G’day everyone – It’s Joey here 😀
A New Creative Adventure: My First Lino Cut Printing Kit 🎨✨
This year, I was lucky enough to receive a birthday gift that feels like a little door opening into a whole new world: my very own lino cut printing kit! 🎁🖌️ I’ve had my eye on the lino printing classes at our local community arts center for ages, where they regularly run workshops for beginners—but, true to form, I never quite got around to signing up. Life, right? 😅
But now, thanks to this thoughtful present, I can finally dip my toes into the craft right from home. I’m definitely going to need to enlist the help of a few YouTube tutorials to figure out what I’m doing 😂, but I’m excited to just play. I’ve never tried lino cutting before, but I’ve always loved the textures and bold contrasts of lino and woodblock prints. There’s something so tactile and expressive about them—like drawing with a carving tool instead of a pencil. 🪵✍️
One of my biggest sources of inspiration is the work of Julie de Graag, a Dutch artist known for her stunning woodcuts and linework. Her prints are full of quiet detail and an almost lyrical simplicity, often focusing on nature—trees, animals, flowers—with a strong graphic sensibility. 🌳🦉🌸 Her style manages to be both delicate and bold at the same time, which is exactly the kind of look I hope to explore in my own experiments. You can read more about Julie de Graag and see examples of her beautiful work on her Wikipedia page. 📚🖼️
Joey Cardmaker 