I didn't plan to become a printmaker. I went to a one-day workshop, picked up a gouge for the first time, and left with Mountain Peek — my first carved block, my first pulled print, and apparently a new obsession.

Linocut is a form of relief printing. You carve away everything you don't want to print, ink the raised surface that remains, press paper against it, and pull. The negative space — everything you removed — stays white. Except it's not always clean. Sometimes a stray mark survives a carving pass, a ghost of a line you thought you'd cleared, and you have to go back and clean it up. The block talks back.

The carving itself is irreversible. Every cut is permanent. You can't un-carve a line, which makes the process different from painting in a way that's hard to explain until you've felt the gouge slip and watched a clean edge disappear. That irreversibility keeps you present in a way that slower, more forgiving mediums don't always demand.

The thinking is in reverse, though. See what you carve, the print comes out the opposite. The block is a mirror of the print. I actually put a mirror beside a block to sign my art once. I looked at the mirror, but it was surreal to sign that way.

Open and closed editions — what that actually means

When I release a linocut print, I decide up front whether it's open or closed edition.

A closed edition has a fixed number — and when that number is reached, the block is destroyed. Mountain Peek, my very first carving, felt like it deserved that permanence. Suspicious Cardinal — my first attempt at two-color registration — earned it too. Both felt like milestones worth protecting. After those editions closed, I destroyed the blocks. For the Suspicious Cardinal, both the key block and the color block were destroyed, and fragments were preserved so they can be included with prints as physical proof. You can watch the block destruction on YouTube — it happened publicly, on camera, because the scarcity shouldn't require you to take my word for it.

An open edition means I can print more when inventory runs low. The Comfy Crappie is open edition — same block, same process, available as long as I keep printing it.

Neither is better. They serve different collectors.

Why these aren't machine prints

Hand-pulled prints have variation. Ink coverage shifts slightly from one pull to the next. Pressure isn't perfectly uniform. Paper can shift a hair during registration. For a two-color print like the Suspicious Cardinal, I built a registration system from a recycled cracker box to keep the red and black layers aligned — and it works well, but "well" in printmaking still means hand-made.

The larger the print, the larger the variation. Comfy Crappie — an 8×10 linocut with detailed realistic fish scales — currently runs about a 1-in-3 success rate for prints I consider sellable. It isn't about the quality assurance, though that is important. It's about the process. The hand-pulled nature of the print means that one print I may have done a figure eight when pressing the paper or be completely random on the next one. It causes variation, but also human presence for every single handmade print.

Curious about the other mediums I work in? Check out The Mediums I Work In for a deep dive (or to continue down the rabbit hole) into how I got into each one and what they mean to me.