Toward the end of 2025, I became increasingly curious about stamp carving and block printing. It started with a pile of books from my local library and following a bunch of interesting folks online, and led to me buying a small stack of rubber erasers to try carving them with an Xacto knife and printing from them. I was hooked! For Christmas, my family gave me a beginner linocut kit and I haven’t looked back.
If you’ve been around a while, you know I love a good project. I became a professional photographer after working my way through a couple of years of 365 photo-a-day projects, and I know a quick way to build skill in something is to work on it a little bit every day. So I bought myself a notebook and started my 100 days project in block printing on the solstice. Who needs to wait for January 1?
The first couple of days were rough. Although I have a decent sense of composition and design from many years as a photographer and a lot of time dabbling in graphic design, I realized in a hurry that I don’t know how to draw and was not even really great at tracing. The drawing was hard!
I loved the ideas, even if I was constantly frustrated by the gap between what I could imagine and what I could execute. When I got my hands on some SpeedyCarve (a soft carving medium that’s a lot more beginner-friendly than linoleum for block printing) I found it much easier to work on a scale larger than an eraser. My first design was tracing a manual typewriter that I found on a royalty free image site and an image of an old Brownie camera that I’ve had since childhood that my husband Mark created for me ages ago in Illustrator.
Each day, I worked on small and larger projects and each day brought new lessons. My family is full of artists, and my kids gave me tips on things like how to break down images into shapes. My patient husband spent one Saturday morning teaching me about one-, two- and three-point perspective. I consumed more library books, pinned more ideas on Pinterest, and followed more creators on Instagram.
My next project was inspired by my long-time Muse, Watson’s Mill. It’s a beautiful heritage grist mill at the centre of our rural village, just a few hundred meters from the house. I’ve taken photos of it in every season and every light, and made an embroidered felt interpretation of one of my favourite photos. So it seemed natural to try to interpret the Mill as my first fully original drawn, carved and printed image. Here’s the reference photo and the fibre-based interpretation from a few years ago:
And here’s my linocut interpretation. I’ll be honest, I was beyond delighted with how this turned out. This is just 2 weeks into my block printing adventure – what an improvement, right?
Every few days, I’d do a larger inking and printing project, but in between I was continuing to play with eraser stamps. I was madly inspired by Serena Rios McRae’s book Pink Eraser Art. (I got the PDF version with a discount code from Serena’s Instagram account.) It’s a hugely helpful and comprehensive book with tutorials not just on carving but on drawing and lettering. I think you can see the progression in my eraser stamps as I was learning what would work and what I am capable of achieving. Some are better than others, but all of them were terrific learning opportunities. We learn by making mistakes and learning how to avoid or fix them, right?
My first attempts at lettering did not fare well, despite what I learned from Serena’s book. I tried to copy a serif font with thick and thin strokes, thinking it mirrored the style of carved strokes. I had what I thought was a fun idea in my head, the idea of the retro typewriter with the phrase “Be patient with me, I’m from the 1900s.” I tried again with a far simpler sans serif font and it was better, but still not what I had imagined. I think I need to set aside this idea for a while until my carving skills catch up with my imagination, but I did learn a lot working through a couple of iterations over a few days, and then playing with proper inking techniques some more.
One of the things I learned is that my favourite medium to print on is recycled grocery bags! Affordable, if nothing else. 😉
So that’s been the first 20 days of my 100 days project exploring linocut and block printing. I’m still not 100% sure of the difference between those two terms, so I continue to use them interchangeably despite the fact that I am carving soft plastic and have little interest in carving actual linoleum. But I do admit that the ancient art of woodcuts does tweak my curiosity. One thing I will say is that sticking with a forgiving carving medium has got me well over a month into this project without a single stab to my fingers – if you know what a klutz I am in real life, you’re as surprised by this as I am!
I’m quite behind in sharing this project to the blog, so I’ll have my next 20 day instalment up in a few days. I haven’t included every day of the project in this post, but I have been documenting them regularly on Instagram @curious.crone (including some videos) if you’d like to see more and follow along. This has been a delightful adventure to explore through the cold doldrums of January. Stay tuned for more!
Have you experimented with eraser stamps, carving or block printing? I’d love to hear about your experiences!