Lately, I’ve become fascinated by printmaking: linocut, screen printing, gel plate printing, cyanotype. It’s something that first captured my interest while scrolling through Instagram.
Discovering Gel Plate Printing
At first, it was gel plate printing. I was watching people layer acrylic paint onto gel plates, then press images into the paint, leaving the picture behind. I found it especially interesting when people were using their own photographs instead of magazine clippings or found images and incorporating those into the prints.
Photography is something I’ve always had a long relationship with, but I fell away from it over the years. Part of that was because photography started to feel oversaturated. Everyone had a camera in their pocket, everyone had an Instagram feed, and it became harder for me to connect to it creatively in the same way I once had.
So I kept taking pictures, but mostly for myself.
There are some really incredible things about the digital age. Being able to take thousands of photographs without worrying about film or processing costs is amazing, and having instant access to your images still feels a little magical to me sometimes. But the downside is that most of our photographs just live on devices now.
I probably have thousands of photos spread across hard drives, old phones, cloud storage, and forgotten folders on my computer. Over the years, I’ve probably lost thousands more to crashed drives and failed devices. Meanwhile, older generations still have boxes of photographs and albums they can physically sit down with, flip through, and pass around.
There’s something sad about realizing how disconnected we’ve become from our own images.
Watching people transfer printed photographs into gel plate prints got me thinking that maybe this was a way to reconnect with photography again. Not just as something digital, but as something physical. Something tactile.
Returning to Photography Through Cyanotype
Of course, once I started exploring that world, Instagram’s algorithm was more than happy to keep feeding me more printmaking content, which is how I eventually found cyanotype printing.
I actually got my start in photography before the digital revolution, back when cameras used film and you had to process everything in a darkroom before you could even see the results. I spent years developing negatives, making contact sheets, and printing photographs using enlargers and chemicals.
God, those were good times.
And honestly, cyanotype has reconnected me to a lot of what I loved about photography in the first place.
The process involves coating paper, fabric, wood, or other surfaces with a light-sensitive emulsion, then placing objects or photo negatives on top and exposing everything to UV light. Once you rinse it with water, the exposed areas turn this beautiful deep blue while the covered areas stay white.
It’s super cool, but beyond the visuals, what I really love is that it slows me down again.
Digital photography made photography easier and more accessible, which is great, but it also removed some of the deliberation from the process. When you could only take so many pictures because film cost money, or when every print required actual physical work in a darkroom, you became much more intentional about what you photographed and what you chose to print.
Now cameras can hold thousands of photos, and editing software can fix almost anything afterward. I’m guilty of it too. It becomes easy to shoot endlessly without really engaging with the process in the same way.
Cyanotype has reminded me how much I enjoy not just taking photographs, but physically working with them afterward. Creating negatives, coating surfaces, exposing prints, rinsing the images out by hand. It feels connected to those early experiences I had learning photography in darkrooms years ago.
Falling in Love With Linocut
The other printmaking process I’ve become obsessed with has almost nothing to do with photography at all: linocut printing.
Linocut is essentially carving an image into a linoleum block by cutting away all the negative space around it, kind of like creating a stamp. It’s something that fascinated and intimidated me for a really long time.
People often comment on how much patience quilling must take, and I usually smile and agree, but truthfully, I’ve never really thought of quilling as patience-driven work. What I love about quilling is how hands-on it is. I’m shaping the paper, building texture, physically constructing the image layer by layer.
Linocutting grabbed me in almost the exact same way.
There’s something incredibly satisfying about carving into the block, feeling the grooves develop under your hands, slowly shaping the surface and watching the image emerge. It gives me the same feeling I get when I run my fingers across a finished quilled surface and feel all the ridges, swirls, and texture of the paper.
It feels real.
Creative Rediscovery Through Printmaking
Honestly, everything I’m exploring right now is exactly what I hoped would happen when I shut down my studio in 2021.
I loved having that studio, but over time I started feeling boxed in by it. I had become known for a certain kind of work, and while that traction was exciting, it also started feeling limiting. Like I had to keep making the things people expected from me instead of allowing myself to evolve creatively.
What I didn’t expect was how much shutting down the studio would shut me down creatively too.
It took a long time for me to reconnect with myself and feel excited about making art again. Longer than I thought it would.
But lately, through printmaking, photography, carving, texture, experimentation, and all these tactile processes, I finally feel like I’m finding my way back to myself again — and maybe toward whatever comes next.
