How Are You So Good At Lino Printing? I'm Trying To Self Teach Myself!!!!

How are you so good at Lino printing? I'm trying to self teach myself!!!!

Short answer: Thank you so much! I really like making all of my art and I've had a lot of practice.

Long answer: I went to school and spent roughly 6 years doing nothing but learning how to skillfully make art, how to know the world how it really is, and how to have big cohesive thoughts and opinions about anything given enough time to write it all out. College! I recommend it.

I spent a lot of 2010 to 2012 working on the pieces you see here on my tumblr and if they were organized chronologically, you'd see how much I improve from one project to the next due to the feedback I received from my friends and teachers both in critique and informally when I asked for help.

Printmaking is very process oriented, if you want to get better at the process: you should try taking a class or at least watching a demo at an art supply store, that way you can see somebody do it live and ask them questions as they go along. Ideally you'd get to use a press too, I may be stuck using a spoon to print with now, but nothing beats a press for making it easy to print big.

But, if you think you've got a handle on the process (hint, warm up your linoleum a bit and it will become easier to carve) the rest of it is just practice, and figuring out what you want to make and how you want it to look, before you try and do it, without getting bored because you over-thought the idea, or paralyzed by fear that the finished product won't be as good as it already is in your head.

The trick to that is also practice.

The other thing that allows me to create interesting art is that I had to find my center to know what I wanted to talk about in my art. I think everybody goes through this, you’ve got the tools, you know the procedure, now what? what do you want to draw?

Finding your center, your genius-sprit, your idea-particle detector, your muse, your omnivorous all devouring cultural trash compactor, or whatever you call the place where the ideas come from, is important, but everybody already has it, you just have to practice using it.

If you don’t have it yet, or don’t think you do, write out a list of things you’d like to draw normally, things you’re interested in learning more about, your areas of expertise (be they archeology or pop-culture hair styles) things you wish you’d made, things you know you could make better than the original, the things (or people) you obsess over.  What is the best of your life? The worst of it? What can you not stop thinking about?

The things that itch at me, the stuff I absolutely have to shout from the mountaintops, are the things I make art about. Sometimes if I don’t think I have anything I go chase ideas. I drink scotch with friends and talk, or stay up late until my feet feel too comfy and the birds are chirping at the sunrise, or I stare at the computer screen at my job and have a pang of angst and I keep a sketch book and I draw any and every little thought that comes into my head.

And then I do my best to take the little fluttering light of an idea and manifest it right. Sometimes I manage it, other times I don’t do as well as I’d hoped. But there is always next time.

Oh, and also.

If you don’t manage to print square on the paper, either make a jig to hold everything in the right place, mount it right  when you frame it. or use enough paper so that you can cut it square after the fact.

Somebody somewhere will love everything you do.  If you have something genuine to say it’ll speak to somebody. No matter if you don’t think it’s good enough or not. There’s no such thing as perfection, there is only hard work and being true to yourself and your idea.

Thanks again for the compliment, it means a lot to me.

 Happy New Years and good luck to you.

Cat of the West,

(part of my guardians of the four corners of the world series)

edition of ~5 linoleum print with handcoloring

showing you all this one today because I have just sold my last physical print of this edition. (whoo hoo for cash! people like cats, what can I say) it is part of a set of four I made out of hotdog-cut halves of the large linoleum blocks I use. they were partly inspired by the houses of Hogwarts, the cat, of course, is a miniature Griffindor lion. this is about as close as I get these days to fan-art and it's pretty well removed.

slavish dedication to a franchise at the expense of your own creative imagination can be just as limiting as insisting on being absolutely original at all times. take your ideas where you can, and try to do them as best you can.

alright, in my last post I talked about how I get different kinds of support from the people around me. my art friends are of the opinion (mostly anyways) that anybody can do anything and that's good art, as long as the artist does that thing with skill and care and can then explain why the choices they made were necessary.

non-art (aka: normal) people can be more of a mixed bag, they can't critique you effectively on technique because they have little idea of how you made what you made, and so there is more of a direct attack on the ideas.

my sister dislikes my deer girl series for a number of reasons, first, because it's really very hipster to have women standing around with either antlers on their heads or branches made to look like antlers. (I can explain that I'm tapping into the collective unconscious mind and the current zeitgeist, but this is dismissed as an excuse for copying an already unoriginal idea)

secondly, because they are self portraits of me showing me as a person who has stupid and vulnerable feelings. Kenz views this as worthless and self indulgent narcissism.

third, at times my work is either trite or visually unappealing and I am derided for being insufficiently appealing and commercial. not that I will ever make enough money at it and why don't I have a job yet?

my life and my work are thus deemed worthless and immature, like Freud who opined that the artistic urge ultimately derived from an infant's fascination with their own feces and the corresponding urge to smear poop on the wall.

haters gon' hate, as they say.

but credit for these two skulls goes to Mackenzie and her critiques of my work, I asked for inspiration because I was in a rut and she said, "I'm bored of your whiny bullshit. draw me some skulls or something and you'd better make it look cool" and lo, an idea did come upon me and I did make it, and it was good.

I consider these two to be a diptych, and the only complete pair is now in private collection. (so HAHA I already found it a good home bitches, ya'll can just be envious) I only printed two of the deer skull on the black before carving it away to make my colored prints, and one of them was destroyed. it's weird for me to have unique art and there is always a printmaker-ey fret that I should always have backups of my art.

the plants are aconite and creeping blackberry. the skulls are from a wolf and a deer.

edit: added some old photos from when I first printed this image to show some of my process

Just wanted to say, I think your prints are beautiful!

Thank You!

 A Cat May Look At A Kinglet.

This is an example of the title driving the idea. I wanted to do something interesting with an extra half-block I had laying around and I was in a really pissy mood which was mostly directed at the people around me.

if you couldn't tell by the kitty-gon' cut-a-bitch expression in that cat's face.

anyways, this is another exploration into using color, and another example of why I don't spend a lot of time working with color. I naturally tend to use color like a printmaker, my impulse is to lay down blocks of a single color that may be built up or layered but still exist in blocks. I admit that this is unnecessary in a piece like this, where the color is applied by handcoloring with watercolor paint.

so I'm stuck in a bit of a bind when it comes to critiques, on the one hand I catch crap from painters for not using color like a painter if I'm going to paint at all. "it should be more blended, why do you still need those dark outlines, you need to look at real colors out in the world, blue isn't just a monochromatic blue, you can't just decide you want a color and take it right out if the tube"

valid, but annoying, I like my blocks of color.

and the printers, who don't consider hand coloring to be a legitimate printmaking process, because it is both applied directly by hand to the paper with out an intermediate step, and because it destroys the sanctity of a printed edition by introducing irregularities.

as if my color editions aren't irregular as all heck as it is.

storal of this mory, if you can't please everybody, you gotta please yourself.

ok so, here's a piece that isn't up anywhere else on the internet with the possible exception of my facebook it's called "And The Geese Had Never Noticed Him"

consider it as a waaaaaaay out view of everything, I wanted something a little ominous, and I wanted a dragon, so he's there breathing out clouds on a mountain top, you'll note the title makes you as the viewer go "who's this personal pronoun? is there a thing aside from geese and mountains in this picture that I might not notice right away?" and then the waldo hunt begins.

it needs that title because otherwise the dragon is often completely overlooked. and I feel like I should have put in a mountaineer or two for scale because he's actually gigantic. oh well, gives me an excuse to draw more dragons maybe later if I feel like it.

that dragon really should be named Waldo, if I was a type who liked handing out names.