Linoleum Block Printmaking with Laura Wilder

You love block prints, and you would love to try block printing. But you hesitate to take this class because you’ve never done any printmaking. Or even any drawing. Or anything artistic in your whole dang life.

Or you’re a professional artist who worries it will be too easy, and you’ll finish way ahead of everyone else.

Fear not! Block printing is The Great Equalizer: artists and amateurs and everyone in between are bound together by the challenges and rewards of this process. During this workshop, you will amaze yourself by carving and printing two linoleum blocks, one for each color, and printing your own two-color note cards. They will not be perfect (that is the charm of the handmade print). But they will be fairly stunning.

Designs will be provided, or you can bring your own sketches.

Laura Wilder will demonstrate the steps and as you work, she will tell you stories of triumph and tragedy, using some of her own prints to illustrate. And she will provide you with your own block printing kit to take home so you can continue on your own printmaking journey long after the workshop has ended.

To register for this class with Laura Wilder, please visit our class website.

About Laura

After getting her degree in art and spending several unsatisfying years as a graphic designer and commercial illustrator, Laura discovered the designs and philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement. Inspired, she learned printmaking, and submitted her vintage-style block prints and paintings to the Roycroft Renaissance Jury. Approved, she became a Roycroft Renaissance Artisan, and was soon elevated to Master Artisan status. Being certified to put the “RR” mark on one's work indicates very high quality in design and hand-craftsmanship.

The block prints are created by doing a separate hand-carving and printing for each color in the print. The printing is done on an antique hand-cranked letterpress. This method is a laborious adventure, and Laura has written several blogs about the process as she goes through it. Read them on the “Laura/Blog” page of the website, www.laurawilder.com. Laura has won many awards and prestigious commissions over the past twenty-two years, and is on exhibit at art festivals, in galleries and shops nationwide, and at laurawilder.com. A complete resume is available on the website.

Thematically her art explores what her distant cousin Laura Ingalls Wilder called “the sweet, simple things of life,” especially the beautiful effects of light in nature.