In Printmaking II at Cape Fear Community College, many of our projects centered around taking processes we used in Printmaking I, but pushing them further in some way. As one of our earliest projects in Printmaking I was to create linoleum relief prints, it was then only natural that we would use linocut prints again in Printmaking II. The difference this time instead of printing only one layer of color we would use the reduction process, in which the linoleum block is successively carved, to print several. As this was one of my first opportunities to create a multilayered print, I decided to maximize it by finding a particularly colorful and textured frog species to depict. After some time researching different frog species, I landed on the adorable Pristimantis crucifer, or Blue-Thighed Rain Frog.

I not only wanted to depict a Blue-Thighed Rain Frog but push myself to give it a particularly engaging pose that would showcase its colorful eyes and thighs. Therefore, rather than drawing as directly from specific references as I usually do, I created an entirely new pose of my own, as well as drawing leaves less from references than to what I hoped fit the composition. Then, considering the many colors found in my chosen species, I decided to divide my piece not into the minimum two or three layers, but seven. This way I could have yellow and green for the majority of the skin, red for its eyes, pink for its belly, brown and black for its markings and pupils, and blue for its distinctive thighs. Working from light to dark, after drawing my design onto my linoleum block, I used a white Posca pen to draw everywhere I wanted to leave the white of the paper, which mainly included bright highlights reflecting off of the frogs’ textured skin. I then carved these areas away with linoleum cutters, rolled yellow across my block, and preceded to print twenty-four prints with it. With a reduction process, the moment you move on to the next layer, you can never go back to make a new print. I already messed up one of my prints with the first yellow printing, so it would be a gamble to see how many of my remaining prints would last the next six layers.

Over time, this process grew into a bit of a routine. I would bring my printing block and a linoleum cutter home every other day or so to draw out and carve each new layer. Then, would bring my block and cutter back to the printmaking studio and spend a few hours mixing ink, rolling it onto my block and pressing and rubbing my prints onto the block to add a new layer of ink. After about two days, the relief ink would be dry enough for me to add a new layer, and thus the process repeated itself. Of all the stages, drawing and carving was extremely enjoyable. After how much I physically struggled to carve my wood relief in our previous project, it was breathtakingly easy to carve even the smallest, most intricate details into linoleum, and I reveled in it. Meanwhile, aligning the blocks for printing became increasingly more difficult and stressful as time went on. Our two different printing blocks were angled slightly differently, so small displacements could have huge ramifications for my detailed designs. Additionally, as layers piled onto my prints, they gained more texture, and with less surface area actually contacting my printing blocks, they grew a tendency to slip and slide as I was printing them. And with printing so many of them, I would often head to the printmaking studio at 8am, work until my classes began, then go back after my classes and work until 8pm that evening to finish printing a layer and to clean up all of the oily relief ink.

With as intensive as this process was along with being sick for a week and attending a fieldtrip for Spring Break in the midst of this, the whole process took me a month. That said, I would not have worked as hard on this had I not sincerely enjoyed it! To my surprise, about sixteen of my prints actually mostly came out in the end, far more than the eight or ten I had hoped for. Despite my excessive planning, this piece did not come out quite like I imagined. I think I left too much distracting red and blue in the each of the leaf, and should have left more yellow, pink and green throughout the piece counteract them. I also maybe should have limited myself to only five or six layers, as the overall result is a little distracting and hard to read. That said, I am both proud of the dedication I put towards achieving these pieces and the finished result, and am have glad to have learned so much about printmaking and linoleum reliefs through the process of creating them.