Trying Something New

 One of the things artists have to fight against during their careers is stagnation.  If an artist just keeps making the same kind of art with the same medium eventually they will lose enthusiasm and excitement and their art will become stale.  I'm still relatively early in my art career so I've tried a lot of different styles and mediums and am still in some ways still finding my way to my thing so I still experiment quite a bit, but still the possibility of stagnation is something to keep in mind.

So, is that why I decided to try linocut prints?  No, not really, it's just something that has interested me for some reason for quite some time and I finally decided to give it a try.

Here in this photo I've just started carving my first linoleum block. Turns out this particular material is somewhat difficult to carve, the only carving tool I have that would work on it was a medium size gouge. 

In this photo the carving is done.

In this photo you see my first two test prints, one came out dark and one too light.  Obviously practice is in order.

Here is my first printing run, most of them at least, I decided to keep this run small, just an edition of ten.  As you might be able to see in the photo each print is a little different.  I don't know how much of that is my beginner materials, my inexperience, or just the variability of the process itself, I suspect some of all three.  I'll be trying different materials for the next linocut print and we'll see if the consistency improves.

Here is #1 in the edition with a mat.  The image is 4" X 5" but I printed it on 8" X 10" paper so it will fall perfectly into an 8" X 10" frame with a 5" X 7" mat as shown.

"County Barn"

Here is a close up scan of #1 in the edition, titled, signed and numbered.