Woodcut Printing

I’m not sure if you all know this about me, but I am a printmaker by trade. I fell in love with it when I was in high school. I had an amazing art teacher (Hi Ms. Raymond!) who introduced me to the medium and always encouraged me to push its boundaries. I became obsessed with printmaking and its endless possibilities. I spent countless Saturdays with Ms. Raymond in the studio working with the materials, running print after print through the press. It meant so much to me that she would take time out of her life to help me create almost every weekend of my junior and senior year of high school. She even let me come back in my college years to use the studio. From drypoint etchings, lithography, to aquatints and mezzotints, and my all time favorites, woodcuts and linocuts. Ms. Raymond taught me everything. She even encouraged me to combine my two favorite mediums, photography and printmaking, and create solar print etchings with light sensitive plates from my photographs (I'll share those in a different post). Eventually my hard work paid off and several of my linocut prints made it into the Dallas Museum of Art and toured around to various museums around the United States.

My love for printmaking continued when I went off to college and ended up being the emphasis in my Fine Arts major. For my senior year thesis, I decided I would push my printmaking limits and make a seven foot long woodcut of the constellation calendar in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.. It took me over three months to hand carve the blocks and when it came time to print, the blocks ended up being too big to fit in the printing press, so I had to print by hand. It took over 4 hours to ink up the woodblocks and another 2ish hours to pull a print. After many trial and errors (and a ton of frustration) with various types of paper, I decided to try printing on vellum and ended up loving it. It gave each print a rough texture and pulled up so smoothly every time I went to print. The only problem was that it took about two months for each print to dry completely. Eventually, they dried in time for our senior show and stayed on display in the Meadows Museum for several months. By the end of the process, my hands were practically destroyed and so so tired. I had to put printmaking on hold to give them a break.

After a very long hiatus, I’ve been dying to get back into the medium and am so pumped that my mom and I now have an art studio to work in. I feel like I’ve been missing that creative part of myself and am so happy to finally have a place to work and get back in my creative groove. Sorry this wasn’t a “fun” post, but I just wanted to share a side of me that you all probably don’t know about! Stay tuned to see more work if you're interested! Happy Monday!