Welcome back, I am excited to share my first post about printmaking. I will be talking about a couple of relief prints I made recently and sharing the process from start to finish. I have a lot of photos and videos of the stages of the prints. I have the same process and the same steps for all of my prints and I will be showing both prints throughout the post. Having the same process brings consistency to each print and makes it easier for me to produce more prints or multiple prints at the same time.

Some of you may be wondering what is a relief print? Well, a relief print is where you carve away from a surface and what is left behind gets inked then printed. So you crave or take away everything you don’t want to be inked. A simple way of thinking about this is to picture a black and white image. In relief there is only positive and negative. The black in the image is what will be inked and printed, the white is what gets carved and taken away from the plate. In all of my relief prints I start with a black and white drawing. For these two landscape prints, I worked off photos I’ve taken. One from a trip to Oregon of Little Zig Zag Falls and the other from this summer's hike in Glacier National Park. I draw more detail in my drawing than what I expect to be printed. This helps me with the composition so when I am carving I have a better idea of the image and the final result I want. It is always easier to simplify the print bythan to add more detail back in.