I began this process in April while the Covid-19 pandemic was taking over and changing many aspects of our lives. It also happened to line up with what was the final months of my first year of teaching art. The sudden change to online learning was drastic, unorganized, and felt overwhelming for me and many of my colleagues (and the rest of the world). Surprisingly though, I had more time to work on art projects since I wasn’t commuting and teaching in-person everyday.

Initially, I made two different designs and printed them onto postcards to mail out to family and friends. (I’ll post images of these on my portfolio soon). Making block prints on linoleum is just too fun, so I sought out a new challenge. Somehow I wanted to create a block print that captured human interaction with nature. At the time, I was getting outside as much as possible whether it was in my yard or out on a hike. We lost much of our face-to-face connections, but elements in nature were something most of us could still access and touch. My intention with this print design was to bring awareness of the importance of the natural environment for our humanity, inspired by the climate crisis and the hashtag #createartforearth (which I learned about through a webinar in the spring). Additionally, I wanted to share my art and creative process with my students.

I discussed my printmaking process with my advanced art class and put together 3 different videos with the time-lapse feature to capture the 3-layer printmaking process (see below). This is the largest lino block I’ve used so far (8″x10″) and was a really enjoyable project to work on. It was challenging to line up the block for each layer and the color mixing got a little out of hand at times, but I think worked out fairly well in the end.

**Special shout-out to Christian for supplying the music for all the process videos.