WORKSHOP: Intro to Linoleum Block Printing with Robynn Smith
September 6 & 7, 2025
10:00am – 4:00pm
Cost: $250.00
Materials fee: $30.00 includes inks, two 6x6” linoleum blocks, paper and use of carving tools.
Often characterized by flat colors and bold graphic shapes, block printing has long been an affordable and approachable medium for creating multiple prints. From a block of linoleum, an image is created by carving away areas of negative space. Leaving only the final design, the block can then be rolled with ink and printed using a press or by hand. Once carved, the block can be printed indefinitely, varying color, orientation, and layering additional blocks. Led by artist and printmaker Robynn Smith, this workshop will offer an introduction to the block printing process, exploring techniques for carving, printing, using multiple blocks, and more.
About ROBYNN SMITH Robynn Smith is an internationally exhibiting painter and printmaker and Professor Emerita at Monterey Peninsula College. Smith’s works combine many layers of information that combine to both reveal and obscure moments of beauty and horror. The tactile subtleties of carved and printed surfaces merge with embedded and transferred photographic processes which focus and sharpen the impact of the imagery. The resulting works create a surprising visual language that reaches places of tender familiarity, shocking trauma, submerged memory, and subconscious reality.
Reduction print is a single-block multi-color method. It is also known as elimination printing. This is achieved by gradually cutting away the wood block after printing each color stage. All colors are printed out of one block, which is re-carved for each color. Thus, the original block is destroyed during creation, and copies beyond the first edition are impossible. Students will learn how to carve woodblock, layer colors of water-soluble ink, and use the registration system.