A 2-color linocut from start to finish

First, I took a this charming self-portrait:

A picture of my mouth--how charming!

Then, in Photoshop, I traced around prominent lines with the mouse filled in the lips with solid red and the shadows with solid black. I filled in the background with white.

A 3-color digital image, based on the photograph.

I carved the red plate, which would be printed first. Notice that the printed image is now reversed. I printed red in both the red and black areas.

A print from the red plate.

I carved the black plate, which overprints the red. Here's an early print of just the black plate by itself. There were a lot of incidental lines at this stage that I had to go back and carve out.

A print from the black plate.

After running a series of prints from the red plate, I had to run them through again with the black plate. I tried to align them as well as possibly, but you can see some red areas peeking out from under the black. I could have reduced the red areas a little to minimize this, but I kind of like minor registration issues like those.

A print with both colors, the black printing over the red.

I didn't want a border on my prints, so I lopped off a quarter-inch from each side. Voila!

The finished print.