In the Western print making tradition, the brayer is an essential element to the printmaking process. The brayers come in several different sizes, as you can see, I have several different brayers here and the size of the brayer is going to be dependent upon the size of the block. But also, where the imaginary is concentrated and how much space is carved away. I've chosen this size brayer for this proof that we're about to pull. And, it's also very important for me to get a really nice sheet of ink, that isn't too gloppy, but isn't too thin. And it does take a little bit of time to get used to knowing how much ink you need, and how to get that nice layer of ink. But, it will become obvious, once you start laying the ink onto your block of wood. If there is too much ink on your brayer, you're going to get spots. If there's not enough ink on your brayer, than you're not going to get very much ink onto the block of wood. Now, every time I lay ink onto the wood, I'm going to re-charge my brayer of ink. If I was to keep rolling over the block without putting more ink onto my brayer, I would simply be taking the ink back off of the block of wood. Now, the first time that you print, the block is going to be very thirsty. The more successive prints that you make, the less amount of ink that you will need to use. But when you first print, you're going to need to put on quite a bit of ink onto that block in order to get a nicely printed image. Luckily, since I pre-inked my block so that I could see my carve marks, I'm not working on a surface that doesn't have any ink on it whatsoever. So, it won't, it won't take as many layers of ink on it, as it would if it were just a thin block of wood. But, still it's going to need quite a bit.
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