Linoleum Print

Artist statement:

For this art assignment, we were learned about printmaking. For this piece in particular we made lino block prints. For this project, I created four different prints of a frog sitting on a mushroom in the rain. Overall I am quite happy with how these pieces turned out. I think that if I had to change anything I might try to make it a little neater because there were a few ink smudges. My favorite printout of the four is the bicolored one. I was going for a more simplistic look with a few line details.

The materials that I used for this piece were lino blocks, assorted chisels, and printer ink. This was a medium that I worked with before, but this was the first time that I had lots of time to come up with a thurough design and had time to carefully carve it out. Overall I thing that this is a material I would be looking forward to use again in my future are career. The only thing that I found to be difficult about this project and printing the block was that the ink was really hard to not smudge. As for what I printed on I did try a few different surfaces, I ended up making prints on white sketch paper, bristol board, and a dictionary page.

The process of this project was quite simple, it was just laborious. We were given creative freedom to come up with our own designs. I chose a frog because I had recently been looking at red-eyed tree frogs online. As for the rest of the design was inspired by some room decor I had in my room, I wanted to make something that would add to my occurring theme of plants and fungi. The design was pretty simple which I thought was nice because it meant that I didn't have to spend an extremely long time carving and it didn't look too busy. After we transferred our sketch onto the lino block we then traced over it with a sharpie so that we could then carve it out. The carving is what had taken me the longest time, and while I carved I caught up on some of my podcasts. When I was done I ended up printing close to 13 different prints because some I would smudge ink on and others the ink wasn't extremely even, but in the end, I just ended up choosing my favorite four to work with.