5 6 4 prompt “pea pod” which was much less exciting. So I drew a picture of a gorilla bursting out of a pea pod. That then resulted in a series of silly Kong drawings whenever I didn’t like the prompt. I do something similar now to help get my creativity flowing, but it’s not Kong so often these days. I now tend to riff on themes such as tentacles, Baba Yaga or ghosts. Bring us back to the first time you carved into lino. This was at the very end of September 2020. I’d received a linocut starter set as part of the quarterly subscription and I pretty much instantly fell in love with the process. My first design turned out to be what I now realise was a quite ambitious, red and black jigsaw block (a lino block cut into more than one piece so different colours can be applied to each piece with the block put back together for printing), featuring, of course, Kong. I didn’t quite know what I was doing but it seems I had an intuitive grasp of it. I got an overwhelmingly positive response from my little online community when I posted my first print, which seemed to go beyond the polite pat on the back for having had a go, and it really blew me away. I didn’t switch to lino exclusively straight away, but I found myself increasingly drawn to it. By March 2021, I had pretty much decided that lino was my thing and abandoned all other mediums. There’s something risky about printmaking. It’s a notoriously hard to master craft as the outcome never promises perfection. How do you feel about this in approaching a piece? And what’s it like to experience the final pressing of a print? I try not to overthink printmaking, and it helps if you can be fluid with the design and roll with any minor errors. Unless it’s something glaringly obvious, nobody else necessarily knows what 7 you intended to do. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had any disasters however. But thankfully, there have been relatively few from which I have been unable to recover. Owing to the relatively expensive nature of the material, realised that if I wanted to make prints regularly without I bankrupting myself I had to work on a small scale to cut down on costs. But this also had the advantage of forcing me to really hone my skills. The other advantage of working like this is that if a disaster does happen, then although frustrating, not too much is wasted. Using lino for the daily challenges forced me to learn to work quickly and this has also helped in my approach to printmaking. It's meant that I know, should I have to start over, I haven’t lost too much, and that’s made me brave (or perhaps blasé) in terms of executing the carving. However, I do find working on a larger scale more challenging as there is more to lose. On the rare occasions where I find myself procrastinating, it tends to be when I’m confronted with a larger piece of lino. That said, there is nothing quite like the satisfaction of pulling a print and finding it’s worked out as you’d hoped, or the devastation of realising that you forgot to carve a letter in reverse and it’s printed backwards (as these are relief prints, everything has to be reversed when carving so that it prints the right way round). Early on in my journey, I excitedly carved a little Gameboy Mini only to find I’d forgotten to reverse the whole design and the print was back to front! Talk about your discomfort with the label “artist”? I continue to suffer from an incredible sense of imposter syndrome when it comes to thinking of myself as an artist. I’m an accountant by profession for which I’ve worked hard and studied 1. FIRE 2. PANDA IN THE BAMBOO GROVE 3. AT-ST 4. PUNK 5. TENTACLE 6. UMBRELLA 7. THE TOWER
14 Publizr Home