I was watching the home renovation show called "Home Town" last night, and the couple decided to do a wallpaper backsplash behind the range. They went to a local artist who did a lino cut tile about 2-feet square, and they hand-printed each of the 2-foot square wallpaper sections. It turned out lovely (you can see it in the second image in this article under the range hood), and the personality of each piece - inked slightly differently, printed a tiny fraction off from the previous one, etc - really made it lovely and "handmade" looking up close. In art school I had to sample a dozen different techniques and styles, and lino cut (cheaper than wood) was one of them... and I just couldn't wrap my head around TAKING AWAY material to leave the design intact... Even if I did 5 or 6 cuts right, the next one I'd be cutting out the line again, rather than cutting AROUND the line I wanted to keep... and toss that one out, too. The sculptor's mentality of "taking away everything that isn't the piece" is foreign to me. Just can't manage to do it consistently! But then again, when I tried to play piano I wanted the bass notes to be on the right and the high notes on the left... so maybe I'm just weird. :-)
In tag for some reason — Fourth grade — we had to do some kind of art project and I ended up picking scherenschnitte My mom likes to remind me occasionally that my teacher was very impressed by my paper cuttings. That is honestly one of the reasons I chose to go back and dabble in collage in the past few years, and I can see through your comment how the same skills can apply to print carving as well. I was never overly impressed with my own Scherenschnitte but I think that can just be how it goes sometimes. I honestly don’t overtly love this owl either — but couldn’t tell you what exactly I dislike or anything. This one — I don’t know, still just lacking a little something for me. I had some trouble remembering which to carve and which should stay, in all honesty! It definitely can be hard to trick your brain to see in reverse like that and I tend to rely a lot on light boards and reference photos.