A little over a month ago someone asked me how I make my symmetrical floral linocuts, and I said that I'd try documenting the next one so everyone can see what my process is like and perhaps understand why I rarely make process posts (lol).
Before anything, I get my references together - with floral stuff (in this case carnations), I try to use a mix of real photos and older botanical illustrations/prints. Now, this first stunning image shows how I make a lot of small and terrible thumbnails, choose one with a general shape I like, then redraw it a couple times to fill in details and see how things might interact. As you can see in the final thumbnail on the right, I'm still deciding whether to do smooth or wavy leaves.
From this I go straight to the lino! I'm not messing about trying to get a perfect draft. (This time, I'd already got the paper I wanted to print these on and knew I wanted to crop that into B5 sheets, so I used this A5-ish piece of lino so there would be a good printing margin.) Then I start sketching one 'half' onto the lino using my thumbnail as a guide.
Then I flip that part of the sketch onto the other side using tracing paper. This helps me visualise how elements are interacting and I can see whether I need to do any basic structural adjustments before filling in the rest.
In this case I decided I wanted to do four 'stages' of the carnation, the bud, the bud in blossom, the half-bloom and the full-bloom. I had to significantly change a few leaf shapes to be able to fit these elements together, then once again used transfer paper to match one side to the other. Then I carved the outlines just to "lock in" most of the design, which I usually do about halfway through because a) it limits the choices I can make about the rest of the design and b) I tend to be pretty desperate to start carving at this point in the process.
This part is easy because there are hardly any choices left to make, I know where the main flower element is going to be, I stick in a couple of leaves to fill any remaining gaps, then I carve all the outlines.
Last step is carving the flower buds and petals. Sometimes I leave these dark and carve the outlines of the petals, in this case I carved out the inside of the petals because I thought it would look best on my light green Lokta paper. And it's ready to print!
Hello. I am absolutely fascinated by the world of printmaking. I have a lot of questions, and I wonder if you have written them up before, but tumblr search is bad and none of your links seemed to lead to these.
1. This seems to be your private business? Is that so? Or is this a shared business/you’re an employee?
2. How did this business get started? How did you source all the equipment? What were the startup costs?
3. What sorts of end results do you find get ordered most?
4. Do you have any process information centrally documented in a nicer place than tumblr that I can refer to in order to study this?
5. Do you have any resources that are helpful to you? Communities, forums, websites, blogs, art guilds, consortiums, organizations, societies, whatever?
Printmaking as a repairable, sustainable, low-impact/footprint, human scale, tangible technology and method for publishing and information and art dissemination/proliferation is a strong interest and value of mine. I intend to study it in college, and help preserve any and all methods of analog printmaking. I’d love to establish a print shop local to me, as there are none where I am.
Thank you so much for sharing your videos and your work online! And thank you for your time.
Hello!! So happy to hear you've been afflicted with the printmaking obsession. It holds such a wide range of creative possibilities! but it's also really very small and niche in the world, which i think is part of why the communities of printers & artists I've seen have always been really welcoming.
i have sort of answered a little bit of this before in the an sword tag but i never did put that in the header and I have no idea why! it's up there now. anyway. i'll also say, all my answers are going to be letterpress-specific, since that's primarily what i do, but there's a whole lot more sub-disciplines out there under printmaking that encapsulate similar principles as repairable/salvaged equipment, low-impact production, independent publishing history, etc. college is a great time to explore all those options, although worth mentioning, where you go to school might be extremely determinant on what printing types are available to learn! my understanding is lots of colleges would've had their equipment donated by a printer or small publisher, or maybe they bought things in lots from estate sales; the curriculum could be determined by what equipment they have to work on, as well as the experience of the faculty, which are sometimes not quite the same. like, i went to Whitman and i have no complaints about the art department faculty! they taught me a ton of really valuable things from their experience that expanded my ability to make art but they all had very different training than the vanity publisher that donated his whole shop to their printmaking department, you know what i mean? so i also learned a lot of stuff at home relevant to job-printing that just wasn't in the same wheelhouse as any of my teachers. anyway all that to say you can probably check out what is actually living in a school's printmaking department and bios of its faculty to get some clues as to what kinds of process/production will be best supported there.
1: cyclesprefect is my personal imprint name, which i used to use more and still use for a handful of projects that are technically separate from my day-job letterpress work, but mostly it's just useful here as a slightly less professional account than my letterpress-as-day-job things which are primarily on instagram as Day Moon Press. Day Moon Press is the family business, which my mother ran from '76 until she had to retire around 2016. technically it's just me doing all of it these days, but both my parents are still pretty involved one way or another.
2: unfortunately by the family business nature i do not have any useful answers for you on sourcing/startup costs. my mother bought her first press in '75 and it was an extremely different market for equipment back then—most commercial print shops were of the opinion that letterpress was dying (and it was pretty financially inviable as a sole operation for a good 20 years there) and they were dumping the equipment or recycling the metal for $$. she got the big clamshell C&P that i still use all the time for………$75 plus the effort of moving it herself because that's what the guy would've gotten for recycling the cast iron body. the majority of the type collection came from one shop that was liquidating their letterpress department, i believe the guy pointed to two pillars in the warehouse and said, take everything between here and here—could've been as many as 400 founts—for $2000. these days the standing clamshell type of presses are more like $1500-5000 depending on size & condition, and you're still getting it moved it yourself. flatbed presses, which are more in demand as ideal tools for introductory classes, posters, and certain kinds of printmaking, i've seen those listed at anywhere between 5 and 15k. i mean i have questions for the people listing some of these things at over 10k, but it's pretty normal.
but like. this is still not a stable industry in any way yknow. sometimes a person is just selling a whole shop from storage for $4000?? and sometimes people need more space in their garage shop and they just list free presses for pickup. vet at your own risk obviously but. i guess in that way it's still the same as the 70s: keep an eye out for what's available local to you, and people are out there still trying to pass down the equipment to somebody who's going to use it rather than scrap it.
i will also say that at least where i am (seattle) by far the most expensive thing is the real estate to house the equipment. especially if you're interested in being able to work with handset type (which to be clear i recommend highly!! all the low-impact, tangible qualities, handset type is a prime example of those principles), all the tools that go into it can take up a bit more room than lots of other art material. there are definitely options for small, tabletop-size clamshells that can be just a few hundred dollars, but fully refurbished ones can top 1k too. not seeing a lot of tabletop flatbed/proofing presses out there right now, but vandercook no. 0s or similar could be good for a smaller studio as well. anyway something garage-sized or even a second-bedroom sized studio is absolutely workable, you don't need hundreds of square footage to do really really cool stuff, but in big cities it is definitely a hurdle just finding the space to utilize the equipment you find. but i also think that's generally what a lot of printers do anyway: work backwards from the equipment they find to a process that works for them. there's a lot of possibilities in any one press type, you just gotta explore what they're capable of.
if you can find any kind of community print studio around you i've seen that work well for people getting started—work with what they have for a while, get comfortable with a couple kinds of printing, take some stuff for a test drive, and then do more targeted searching for equipment so that you only need to find space for what you really want to use.
3. a lot of custom stuff i do is stationery, professional or personal—lots of business cards/letterhead/etc. for small local businesses, a bunch of wedding invitations, sometimes personalized notecards. i also do custom art prints/poetry broadsides, often for some kind of event/anniversary, like an excerpt from a wedding song for an anniversary type of thing, or very small (1-10 copies usually) editions of hand-bound books, typically where the author comes to me and needs a couple copies for friends/family. i also do retail notecards/prints/small books, but tbh i don't spend the time to make that contribute to the business model most of the year. holiday season i go to as many art markets as i can and it really does help, but there's other printers out there making their whole living off retail/wholesale of their designs and that's not me. i'm way more invested in making time for the custom projects.
4. this is the closest i get to centralized, unfortunately :( i'm happy to answer specific questions about printing process or any wips i post, but i don't really try to make it like, generally educational. most ways of learning in print are i think very case-specific anyway, dictated by the materials/equipment available and the desired end results. once there's a skeleton of tools and subject matter, it's a lot easier to figure out what information is important.
5. there's definitely a strong online community of printers/printmakers! partly because we're a small group scattered all over, partly because exchange of information is pretty central to the survival of the craft. Briar Press is where those classified links come from, it's a pretty active place not just for equipment sales but also general discussion and they've got a specific category for beginners in letterpress. i was just dinking around on there looking for those classifieds and bumped into interesting stuff all on accident. drinking milk to prevent lead poisoning used to be a thing?? it doesn't work, don't try that, but apparently that used to be shop policy in some places. anyway.
unfortunately instagram is the social media platform i find most active with print community, but ah well. chances are there's some group local to you that you could link up with for in-person type things, even if you have to expand the definition of printing to more disciplines (engraving, intaglio, riso, etc) to get a cluster going. you can also expand your search to orgs around book arts, you'll find a lot of printmakers/printer types there too. i keep meaning to go to an in-person Seattle Print Arts event but i always forget to make the time. PiP has a physical location again but they're keeping some of their remote programming, i think mostly shop talks. again depends where you are/if you can travel much, but look for any Wayzgoose events near you if you want to find people in person! they're like a printer-specific type of event, usually these days they're set up like conferences, with talks & workshops and equipment swaps and probably some vending. you meet tons of people there that all have their own niche interests within print, it's great. there's a couple regular/large ones in California, there's two in washington state that i go to often, i'm sure there's more all over. don't ask me about hamilton wayzgoose, i don't know anything more than what other people are posting
last thing on resource gathering, can't recommend enough just getting a couple old books. even regular old original manuals for specific types of equipment, which you can frequently find somewhere on archive.org, or scanned & logged on a janky-looking website some old guy (affectionate) posted 20-30 years ago. antiquarian book fairs, antique shops? poke around and you might find something quite dry and extremely useful about how printing was done 50-100 years ago. at a book fair ages ago my parents got this pair of little "pocket" books that are way too fucking thick to fit in a pocket that were printed in the 1890s, and it's just this one printer in England talking about how to set up your print business, how much to pay what kind of workers, what to charge for this kind of work, how to lay out your type cases when some of your employees probably can't read, etc. they're SO cool.
that's was a lot and i still probably missed something or forgot something important!! but yeah the ask box is always open, im just slow because i say too many words. have fun exploring the medium & good luck finding your print people, i know they're out there!
Do you have any posts about the process of making your symmetrical prints? I’m fascinated by the use of space.
Thank you for sharing your artwork online. It’s delightful
Thanks so much for this, I'm glad you enjoy them!
I don't really have any process posts, that's something I should try to do more of! (If anything it'll be funny to see how I go from the world's ugliest thumbnail sketch to the final product...)
Just to describe it quickly, I first look up references, especially botanical/herbal illustrations so I can understand how other artists have simplified the flowers/leaves or exaggerated what is recognisable about them. Then I do a page or two of thumbnails to try to figure out the general shapes, where the largest flowers should go & how the stems and leaves might work around them, and when I get a vague design I like, I go straight to the lino and start sketching directly onto that. Once I'm happy with one part of the sketch, I trace that onto tracing paper and flip it on the other side of the lino - I really like working bit by bit ON the lino rather than trying to draft the whole thing on paper and then transfer it all together, because as I work the space becomes more and more limited and I feel like the details of the composition sort themselves out as I go. Then I outline everything in pen, add any extra texture or linework in the petals/leaves, and start carving.
Since that basically makes no sense without a visual, I'll keep that in mind for the next one and try to take some pictures as I go!
Wow, what a treat. Saw a linocut and clicked to see more. got greeted with yume nikki art. Today is off to a great start. Thank you for sharing your art ☺️
