5 Years of Printmaking!
Hello first off I want to say Happy Thanksgiving! I hope all of you have a wonderful holiday and get to enjoy a nice meal with family and friends. This year for me our thanksgiving is spread out. My brother and Liz went to Texas for thanksgiving to see our grandparents and other families. Is I won’t see them until Christmas, so This year is just me and my parents in CT.
Since the holiday season is upon us I am having a HUGE sale on everything! If you had your eye on a print now is the perfect time to get it and also anyone of them would make great and unique gifts for the season:]
5 years ago I transferred colleges to Western State in Gunnison Colorado. There I took my first printmaking class and fell in love with the wonderful art of making prints. I thought it would be neat to show some of my first prints from 5 years ago and mark the progression I have made. I feel like I have learned so much about printmaking and yet I also feel like I know so little about it. The wonderful thing about printmaking is that there is a near-infinite way to make a print, even if you narrowed it down to one form of printmaking like “block printing” for example. It is easy to get lost in it but it also allows for a great discovery, and I feel like my journey through printmaking lead me to a discovery I wouldn’t have thought I’d find. When I was first getting into printmaking I wasn’t super interested in “block printing” (that is what I do now) I was interested in Intaglio or etchings. Etchings are where you engrave lines into a surface, most often zinc or copper and you etch those lines in acid. I spent most of my time in college making etchings. It wasn’t until after I graduated I started doing a lot of carvings. The biggest reason why is that to make an etching you need a press and chemicals to etch and I didn’t have any access to that. With block printing, all you need is a block to carve on and a wooden spoon to make a print and that’s how I began my journey into block prints. I quickly began to really enjoy it and actually now I like the carving process the best out of any printmaking practice. A block-print is a more graphic and bold and I have come to realize that form works best with my natural style and that the compositions of my block prints worked better than in my etchings where line is used. I am really thankful that I found something I love so much and that I get to make new artwork. I am excited to see how the next 5 years unfold and where my printmaking will be.
The prints below are from my first year of printmaking, from my first block print, etching, hard and soft ground, reduction relief, first etch with watercolor and so on.
