Katt showed us how to make linocuts this February vacation week!

Linocuts are a kind of block printing. They’re derived from woodcuts, in which you engrave an image into wood, coat it in ink, then press it to paper to print the image.

Linocuts use linoleum instead of wood. I assumed that linocuts would be slightly easier to make than woodcuts, but not by much, because I didn’t know what linoleum was. Linoleum floors, which are hard, are my point of reference.

It turns out that there is a kind used for linocut blocks that is not much harder than tofu. This makes it far easier and safer and than woodcuts. There’s very little worry that you’ll push so hard to make a cut that the cutter will break out of your control and shoot somewhere unpredictable.

It’s very approachable, and I recommend you give it a shot if you’re at all interested in printmaking.

Here’s my first linocut:

Here’s my kid’s second one:

Art is not your vision

I like that in linocut, you cannot ignore the medium.

There’s some amount of working with the medium in all art, at least all the kinds of art I can think of. We tend to admire painters that seem to be able to impose their will on a canvas, like some kind of human inkjet printer. But those painters actually undersand the way that paint moves and settles on a canvas and work with it. So do the more abstract painters that leave in obvious brushstrokes.

When I was a kid, I assumed that the greatest artist was someone that could project whatever was in their minds onto some delivery medium, which would then reproduce that vision exactly in the minds of the recipients. I remember reading in a guitar magazine that we were all trying to make what comes out of the guitar match exactly what was in our heads.

It is actually more interesting when something that wasn’t in your head gets out in your art. It’s good that art media are not lossless projections of brain state. When your idea interacts with your body and the medium, it is now something that has mixed with the real world and his its own life, independent of the artist.

This interaction between artist and medium is what makes art interesting, not only to the viewer, but also to the artist. In this way, it’s not unlike the experience of a roguelike game developer, who is sometimes surprised by their own game.

Ink and plastic are generative

When you’re making a linocut, you’re cutting a mirror image, which will be printed in reverse. You can make a prediction about how this will look, but when you actually see the print, it’s always a tiny bit of surprise.

I cut some very deep grooves to represent the floor in the linocut I made above. Within them, I made more cuts in an attempt to convey texture. In retrospect, the primary grooves were so deep that there is no way these secondary cuts would show up. But I’m oddly glad these cuts exist anyway.

Regardless, the floor took on a slightly convex appearance, which I liked.

Many of the details on the person were lost, but the “vibe” is still right. Same with my cat, who ends up looking like an abstract scorpion in the print. She does in fact have a tiny bit of scorpion nature.

I’ve learned from these outcomes, and I’m sure my next linocut will also have unexpected outcomes.

My son’s first linocut was of a bridge. From that, he learned what I think linocutters throughout the ages knew: It lends itself very well to grainy stuff, like wood and rivers. So, he went all-in with a river and bridges scene for his second one.

His surprise came in the black: Because of the low-ish amount of ink used in that print, the land, which was meant to be all black, gained a texture that actually makes it look sort of like another kind of water. Regardless, it’s cool and can be used toward other ends in the future.

I think it’s important that these surprises aren’t random. They’re rooted in physics, so they have a certain order to them and can be reasoned about to a degree, which can inform future works. The feel is like the difference between pure randomness and Perlin noise, except even more so.

The mix control and surprise in linocut is really delightful. I highly recommend trying it.