The Best Brayers and Block Printing Inks of 2026

A brayer has one job, laying a thin, even film of ink, and the two things that decide how well it does that are the rubber hardness and the frame. The Speedball Deluxe gets both right. The listing states a 40/42 durometer soft rubber roller, which is soft enough to conform to the tiny height variations across a carved block and lay ink into the whole surface, and a heavy duty steel frame that does not twist when you lean on it. Cheap brayers fail at the frame first: plastic arms flex, the roller wobbles, and the ink film goes streaky.

Four inches is the width to start with. It covers a 5 by 7 block in two passes and an 8 by 10 in three, it fits a standard ink slab, and it is the size that the whole Speedball line is built around. For A3 blocks and 12 inch gel plates, a wider roller like the Essdee 30 cm in the comparison table below earns its place as a second brayer. Our linocut and block printing kits guide covers the carving side; this page is about getting ink onto the block.

For decades the choice was binary: water-based inks that dry fast and print flat, or oil-based inks that print beautifully and need solvent cleanup. Cranfield's Caligo Safe Wash is the product that broke that trade. It is a genuine oil-based relief ink, so it rolls out with the long, even tack that lino wants, stays open on the slab long enough to pull a whole edition, and lays down a deep, velvety black. Then it washes off the block, the brayer, and your hands with soap and water.

The one real trade is drying time. Oil-based inks cure by oxidation over days, so an edition needs a drying rack or interleaving with clean paper. Plan for it, and pull on a press like the ones in our printmaking presses guide or with a baren, and this is the best ink on Amazon for lino on paper. Heavy users should look at the 500 g tin at $50.

The pop-in design is a real feature, not a compromise. The roller lifts out of the frame so you can rinse it under a tap and drop it back in, which matters when you are switching colors on a gel plate every few minutes. That is why it is the brayer we recommend in our best gel printing plates guide.

For lino it works fine on small and medium blocks. The frame is where it gives up ground to the Deluxe: under the kind of pressure a dense A4 woodcut wants, the plastic arms flex and the film goes uneven. If that is your work, spend the extra $10. If not, this is all the brayer you need.

The pop-in roller is also the reason to buy this over the no-name multipacks at similar money: Speedball sells replacement rollers, so when the rubber eventually wears or nicks you replace the roller rather than the tool. Keep the roller ends clean of dried ink, where paint collects and cracks the rubber first.

Every printmaker who carves fine detail eventually discovers why hard brayers exist. A soft roller conforms to the block, which is great for coverage and bad for shallow cuts: it dips into them and inks the floor of a fine hatch, and the print goes muddy. An 80 durometer hard roller stays on the top plane and leaves the cuts clean. Wood engravers work almost exclusively with hard rollers for this reason.

The trade is that hard rubber forgives nothing: the block must be flat, the ink film thin, and the pressure even. For bold, graphic lino it is unnecessary. For detailed work it is the difference between a print that reads and one that does not. Speedball also sells the pop-in hard rubber version for $15 if you want the cheaper frame.

Technique for a hard roller: roll out a thinner film on the slab than you would for soft rubber, listen for a fine hiss rather than a wet slap, and ink the block in several light passes from different directions. The hard rubber will not compensate for a thick film the way soft rubber does, so the discipline is in the slab, not on the block.

Essdee is the brand behind most of the lino sold in the UK, and its rollers are the value pick in this guide. The listing states a heavy duty EPDM 40 shore soft rubber roller with an aluminum handle, which on paper matches the Speedball Deluxe's softness at Pop-in money. EPDM is a good rubber for oil-based inks; it does not swell or go tacky with solvents the way cheap natural rubber can.

If you want the full Essdee starter, the Essdee Block Printing Essentials Kit at $30 bundles two rollers, three cutters, a handle, and lino, and it is a sensible first box for a beginner. The 70 shore hard roller at $13 is the detail brayer in the same family.

Because the roller is fixed in the frame, cleaning means wiping rather than rinsing the roller alone. Use vegetable oil on a rag for oil-based inks, then soap, and dry it standing on the handle. Treated that way the EPDM rubber lasts years, which at $15 makes it the cheapest cost-per-edition roller in this guide.

Color relief printing is where ink quality stops being a preference and starts being a requirement. A reduction print stacks three or four layers of ink on the same sheet, and each layer has to lay evenly over the last without lifting it. Oil-based inks with real tack do that; thin water-based inks struggle, and the difference shows most in flat color fields.

The Safe Wash set gives you six tubes to mix from, with the same soap-and-water cleanup as the black. Cranfield also sells a Soft Shades set of 6 for $87 if muted, pastel palettes are your style. Either way, budget a drying rack and patience between layers.

Mixing tip: keep the set's colors clean by mixing on a glass slab with a palette knife and reserving one brayer per color for a session rather than washing between. The ink's long open time means a mixed pool stays workable for hours, so mix once at the start and print the whole layer from it.

If you print a lot of black, the can is the buy. Speedball's Professional Relief Ink line is its traditional oil-based range, and Supergraphic Black is its densest black, formulated for the large flat areas where thin inks go grey and patchy. Eight ounces for $20 is a lot of editions.

The honest difference from the Caligo above is cleanup. This is conventional oil-based ink: vegetable oil on a rag lifts it from the block and brayer, then soap, or a solvent if you prefer. If that is fine in your studio, it prints as well as anything here. If you want water cleanup, Caligo is the answer. Speedball also packages it in a 5 oz tube at $20 for tidier storage.

Because it is stiffer than the Caligo, Supergraphic Black benefits from a minute of working on the slab with a palette knife before rolling, which loosens it to a smooth tack. On a press it needs less pressure than you expect; under a baren it wants a thinner film and patience.

Water-based ink is the right answer for a specific set of jobs, and this set covers them. Fabric printing wants an ink that sets without solvents; a classroom wants water cleanup and quick drying; gel plates want an ink that will not gum up the surface. Speedball's six-color fabric-and-paper set does all three, and $33 for six colors is fair.

Where it falls behind is the print itself. Water-based inks dry as you roll, which means the last print in a session gets a thinner, stickier film than the first, and large flat blacks print unevenly under hand pressure. That is the trade for the convenience, and it is why we send anyone printing editions on paper to the Caligo Safe Wash instead. For a single black tube for fabric, Speedball's 2.5 oz fabric block printing black is $12.

For fabric, follow the tube's directions for setting, print on prewashed cotton or linen, and expect a slightly softer hand than screen printing ink. For paper, work fast, keep a mist bottle nearby to slow drying on the slab, and print on smooth papers where the thinner film shows less.