Laura Boswell is a printmaker based in Scotland. She makes linocut and woodblock prints of the landscape which draw upon her knowledge of traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking techniques. In this Artist Insights film she discusses what she loves about lino, how she captures movement and place through drawing, and how using a limited number of inks can lead to the most complex and nuanced colour mixtures.
Artist Insights: Laura Boswell
Contents
0:00 Introduction
0:51 “Studying art history at university led me to becoming a printmaker”
1:18 “I had to learn a whole new language about landscape”
1:57 “There’s so much to discover in lino and woodcut”
2:29 “I am a reduction printer through and through”
4:26 “Learning the Japanese attitude to practice and discipline was invaluable”
5:44 “Woodblock printing is a dance of steps, and you have to get the choreography right”
6:30 “Mokulito gives you the immediacy of a drawn line”
7:20 “I like using thin layers of oil-based inks”
8:07 “Lino allows me to create any gestural mark I want”
8:47 “Drawing is a curiously physical thing, a real wrestling match”
11:54 “When I’m making the print, everything’s flexible”
13:13 “I make marks on the lino”
14:42 “It’s a juggling match to get the colours on in the right order”
16:18 “People often associate linocut with flat colour”
17:15 “Drying oil-based inks can take a long time”
17:39 “The more you work inks with a roller, the better they will get”
18:11 “Soft and complicated colour mixes are useful for capturing colours you see in nature”
19:45 “I love the technicality of the process”
20:30 “I have a wide range of cutting tools”
22:09 “Lino printmaking is the most forgiving when it comes to paper”
24:06 “There is a sensitivity in hand-printing that you don’t have with a press”
25:54 “Mistakes are a route to developing the print in a different way”
26:41 “The aim of the studio is to make for a good workflow”
27:47 “Tidying the studio helps me think”
28:52 “The printmaking community is incredibly supportive”
29.47 “If I had a secret weapon to share, it’s just to look”
30:54 Credits
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Extract
At university, I studied art history and visual art. It was an excellent opportunity to look both at the history of art and all kinds of techniques and to finally choose printmaking as something I focused on in my final year. And that has led to me becoming a printmaker in the end.
I was at a university in Wales and did a lot of architectural drawing. I used to spend a lot of time sitting on the pavement, either in London or in Aberystwyth, drawing the buildings. When I came back to printmaking after a career in the photographic industry, I had to find my feet again and I moved towards landscape, and I had to learn a whole new language about landscape. I liked the idea of stripping it of all man-made things. I kind of went to the other extreme.
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Balcary Bay
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 34 x 51.5 cm | 13.3 x 20.3 in
My work is based in linocut, woodblock, and Japanese woodblock. There are two basic approaches in linocut – reduction printing and multi-block printing. I am a reduction printer through and through. Reduction means that you use a single piece of lino to create a multi-coloured print by cutting the lino away as you work. So every time you print, you might cut a little bit more of the lino away, destroying your printing block as you create your print.
It’s very much a one-way process because once you start cutting that block, you can’t go back. You begin with your palest colour and you work through to the darkest. The only thing you can do really as protection is to have some prints for making tests before you print the main body of the edition of prints. It’s a process that I find very flexible because you’re working on one block and you’re not fitting a jigsaw together. That block can change as you work. You can redraw it and you can move things and change it to a certain extent.
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Winter at Corgarff
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 29 x 45 cm | 11.4 x 17 in
Japanese Woodblock Printing
The Japanese technique of woodblock printing relies on water-based pigments, which are transparent. It tends to employ a multiple block process where there’s a separate block for each part of the drawing. It has a kind of softness about it and it’s particularly suited to vistas where you have lots of hills and distant views. I was lucky enough to go and study in Japan and it was an opportunity to learn from master craftsmen in the traditional way of printing. I learned the technique, of course, but learning the Japanese attitude to practice and discipline was invaluable. It’s a very delicate technique. Everything is hand-printed and there’s no press involved. It’s a dance of steps and you have to get the choreography right.
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Long Grasses up by Westerdale
Laura Boswell
Mokuhanga (Japanese woodcut), 47.5 x 19 cm | 18.7 x 7.5 in
So coming from blocky linocut, which I already loved, to this kind of multi-layered transparent watercolour process was a real revelation and something which I found a way to bring into my linocut, even though I’m still using oil-based inks and a Western method. I still do use woodcut occasionally but, for the most part, I use lino with a big nod to the kind of advantages of woodblock.
Wood lithography, Mokulito, has been fascinating to play with and it gives you the immediacy of a drawn line. Basically, you’re drawing onto wood with a waxy crayon or paint and then printing as you would a lithograph. There’s not a lot of control involved, so that has kind of the excitement of you never quite know what you’re getting. I love that – you get that kind of immediacy of surface. They have a lot of white space in them and I’m very interested in a Japanese concept called ma, which translates to the space between endings, the idea that there is empty space that has a value as well as space with things in it. That could be in a print or a drawing or it could be in the way you lay out your furniture in the house.
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High Falls
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 44 x 59 cm | 17.3 x 23.2 in
Japanese prints often have 30 or 40 layers to them. My linocut prints are now increasingly transparent and they often have 20 layers or so. I like the idea of using oil-based ink, which is quite a thick, sticky stuff, rolling it out very thin and creating these very translucent layers. I do create smooth layers of colour, but I also like putting down ink that’s so thin that the texture of the paper comes into play.
Starting a Linocut Print
I work with traditional lino. It’s a mixture of wood flour and linseed oil compressed onto a Hessian backing. It has a brittleness to it, and that’s important for me because it means that when I go in with my tool, if I stop cutting, the lino will obligingly snap where I stop cutting. If I was using one of the plastics or vinyls, I would have to make the cut in and also make a cut out because the plastic will just tear if you try and take the end off.
With my linocut, the basis for it comes from drawing, but the way that I draw tends to be very hasty. I work with pen, ink, crayon, and I splash paints and pastels around. I always want to catch that kind of immediacy in the prints. For me, it’s not about getting the right number of trees on the right hill. It’s much more about trying to catch the feeling, being there in that air, in that weather, whether it’s wet or windy or sunny or whatever. It always takes me about an hour before I draw anything worthwhile. So there’s a warm up period. When I’m drawing out in the landscape, these will be very quick sketches. I know that I’m going to generate a lot of rubbish, but there’ll be some useful things as well. So those are very immediate, scratchy, messy sketches.
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Stac Pollaidh
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 42 x 53 cm | 16.5 x 20.9 in
Sometimes I just don’t have the time to sit in the landscape and draw or I want to catch something that’s very ephemeral. So I always take a lot of photographs as well.
When it comes to the print, I’ll do what I would call a design drawing. With that, I sit in the comfort of my studio with a cup of tea and pull together any sketches I’ve made, any photographs I’ve taken. The design drawing will be the size of the finished print.
Creating a Working Drawing
I find drawing is a developmental process. I know it’s there, but it takes a long time to get to. So my drawings are never pretty things, they’re more of a kind of working journey.
Drawing is a kind of curiously physical thing for me. It’s a sort of real wrestling match to get that feel of the form and to describe it. I always think that I’ve done a lot of preparatory work and I’ve got everything drilled down to what I want. But in actual fact, as I’m creating the print everything’s flexible. So I never see it as a lot of preparation done upfront. I have an idea of what I want to say, and I will take whatever route I need to get there. I never pin things down because I find that the evolution of the print will give me direction and end up with a better result. I never know how many layers, or what colours I’m going to use.
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Early Early
Laura Boswell
Combined linocut and western woodblock, 34 x 40 cm | 13.4 x 15.7 in
Transferring the Drawing onto Lino
Once I have a design drawing, I have to get it onto the lino and I need to reverse the image. So I have a very simple way of doing that. I make a tracing and then I simply turn the tracing face down onto the lino and I use carbon paper. It doesn’t mean I won’t redraw it as I go along, but it means that I have the foundation of the original drawing there.
I tend to mark onto the lino, which I then cut around. Because I use traditional oil-based ink, pretty much any water-based marks I make are not going to transfer, so I use a dip pen and Indian ink quite a lot. I like the way that it skitters across the lino, it’s quite blobby and impulsive. I also use felt tip brush pens quite a lot because they give a lovely line. I also use Chinagraph, which is a waxy version of a soft crayon. I paint on the lino as well, and acrylic ink works really well for that. I always give my lino a very light sanding with fine sandpaper, which tends to help it to accept water-based paints.
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Sketchbook Study, Winter
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 40 x 18 cm | 15.7 x 7 in
Colour Layering
One of the challenges of making a reduction print is the order in which the colours come. Some colours are surprisingly dominant, like yellow. A pale yellow can be a very dominant colour against the colours that go on top of it, even dark colours. I’m often asked, what do I do first? Do I do the red, the green, or the yellow? The answer is never very straightforward because it depends on what I want, and whether I want an under colour to change the colour you’re printing or whether you want to hide it completely. I’ve never been in the business of hiding colours completely. Frankly, the best thing to do is test prints to see how it works. I’m a great believer in running tests for almost everything. I’ll put the roller and the ink onto the paper just to check how the colour layering is going to look.
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Autumn Colour
Laura Boswell
Linocut, 36.5 x 56 cm | 14.3 x 22 in
Oil-Based Inks
The inks that I use for linocut prints are oil-based. I choose to work with Cranfield’s Traditional Relief Inks as they have a kind of honesty to them. They’re very beautiful in their pigments, they mix beautifully, and I love the surface finish of them as well. It ties in with that whole business of trying to catch the air and feel of the landscape that I’m working with. Traditionally, linocut inks are very flat. Flat colour is one of the things that people often associate with linocut, but you can push them to become very delicate and transparent. There are a couple of ways of doing that. One way is to use a product that is often called extender. Basically, it’s the ink without any colour in it. What you’re effectively doing is pushing the pigment particles apart so that they become thinner and more transparent.
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Ben Loyal
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 34 x 51.5 cm | 13.3 x 20.3 in
Oil-based inks can take a long time to dry, especially colours like blacks and blues. The drier I like is Cranfield’s Wax Drier and you add it at about four percent. That will drop the drying time from days and days to maybe 24 or 48 hours. The big thing to remember about oil-based inks of all kinds is that they’re thick. That means that the more you work them with a roller, the better they will get. So when you’re rolling out ink, especially the traditional sort, take time to roll them out and work them, especially if the weather’s cold.
When it comes to buying printmaking inks, especially if you’re just setting out, it can be quite intimidating knowing what colours to choose. When I started, I just went for the process colours and black and white. I always think that’s a good place to start because you have to mix your colours from scratch. That teaches you how to produce pretty much any colour you want from a very basic range.
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Patchwork Fields, Bilsdale
Laura Boswell
Mokuhanga (Japanese woodcut), 47.5 x 19 cm | 18.7 x 7.5 in
When I was a student we had to pay for our own printing inks and I didn’t have very much money, so I was really parsimonious with my ink. I used whatever colour I had finished with to mix the next colour that I wanted to use. I still do that today. The benefit of that, quite apart from the fact that it’s good for using up your inks, is that it gives you an increasingly complex colour mix. Because I’m dealing with landscape and I’m dealing with a natural subject, those soft and complicated colour mixes are really useful for capturing the kind of colours that you would see in nature. So I don’t start the day with sort of different colours all laid out on my slab. I’m very much mixing little increments into the motherlode to create my colours. I find that a helpful way of working.
One of the things about printmaking that I love the most is the process itself, the technicality and the demands of it. I do my best to learn about processes, papers, and inks. I have been to visit Cranfield Colours, and I’ve also gone to the Awagami factory in Japan to look at papers. There’s an extraordinary amount of information that’s useful as a printmaker. Seeing why things move as they do, or print as they do, or work as they do. It’s a great privilege to go and learn things like that.
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Summer Shadows
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 34 x 51.5cm | 13.4 x 20.3 in
Cutting Tools
I have a really wide range of cutting tools. I have a range of classic V-shaped tools with a V profile, and U-shaped tools. I met my husband when I was 17 and, heroically, his mother gave me a set of linocut tools that had belonged to her father. Her father was an artist called James Boswell, and he did a lot of book and record covers. I have his tools still, which must date from the 1930s. Now I often use Japanese tools designed for woodcut, which is superb with lino.
My tools are a really mixed bag of levels of professional tools and stars and shapes. If I was cutting along a straight line, for example, I might cut myself a trench with a U-tool and then use the side of the U-tool to give me a nice accurate cut, rather than trying to go perfectly down the line one time. I will also shimmy a tool, so I’ll twist as I cut to create a variation in the edge. So that could be a tiny little tool where I’m just blurring the edge of a cloud by a tiny little bit. Or it could be a great big shimmy to create movement in water. So how I move the tool through the lino can change quite a lot, and that’s why it’s nice to play with a variety of tools to see all of the possibilities.
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Light Study: Storm
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 19 x 22 cm | 7.5 x 8.6 in
Printmaking Paper
Paper for printmaking is an interesting one because lino, probably of all the printmaking processes, is the most forgiving when it comes to paper. But if you’re going to make serious prints, then you do need a printmaking paper. For me, I tend to have a couple of stock papers that I know inside out. I know absolutely how they’re going to behave. But if I want to do something creative or I want a colour or something like that, then I will use a different paper. When I work with a printing press, I tend to use a heavier paper, so I’ll use paper that’s between 280 and 300 gsm. If you’re printing by hand, then you need a lightweight paper, and that’s where Japanese Washi really shines. Washi is a catch-all term for a paper with long fibres, and those long fibres give the paper a lot of strength. You can have a very lightweight paper that will still take the rigours of hand burnishing and hand rubbing, and give a result that’s really fresh and beautiful at the end of it. I have printed with 36 gsm Kitakata paper, and I did a print that was about 15 layers, I think. So Washi papers are very, very strong. They are used a lot in book conservation because of their strength relative to their lightness.
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Kokedera Moss Temple, Kyoto
Laura Boswell
Mokuhanga (Japanese woodcut), 58 x 25 cm | 22.8 x 9.8 in
Printing by Hand and With a Press
When I’m making prints they’re usually fairly large, and I have an Albion printing press to work with. There’s no question that a printing press is great for giving you consistent results and taking a lot of the physical effort out of creating a print. Hand printing is sometimes seen, especially in the context of linocut, as being a compromise if you don’t have a printing press. But actually, there’s a sensitivity in hand printing that you can’t replicate with a press. So often when I get to the delicate parts of the print, although my print is in the bed of the press and it’s set up to print, I will hand burnish areas because there is this communication between your hand and the print and you’re absolutely in control at that point. So I do think hand printing is a wonderful thing.
With reduction printing, because of its process, you’re removing material from the plate. So that plate is changing all the time in the amount of material on it. You have to change the amount of pressure that’s needed. I have everything from a traditional bamboo-wrapped disk called a Baren from Japan, I have a glass Baren, and I have one with ball bearings in it. But I also use metal spoons and wooden spoons, and I’ve got a bit of a stair rail that I use as well sometimes. It’s really about using whatever is appropriate for the amount of pressure I want to put on. Sometimes I’ll work with the heel of my hand as well.
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Rain and Light, West Coast
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 81 x 50 cm | 31.9 x 19.7 in
Correcting a Mistake
One of the questions I get asked a lot is what happens if you go wrong, and once you’ve cut a block, can you correct it? And actually, I don’t ever see it like that because inevitably when you’re cutting, you might cut something that you weren’t expecting to cut. But almost always there is a way out of that situation. Quite often I find that I use it as a route to develop the print in a different way. The other thing is that the more used you get to cutting lino, the less likely you are to make mistakes. That being said, I still put big pieces of masking tape with “do not cut” or “cut this bit, not that” written across it because everybody makes mistakes.
A Typical Working Day in the Studio
I’ve had various studios of various sizes and the new one that I have up in Scotland is big enough to teach in, and it has a little gallery at the front that visitors can go to. My biggest object in the room is the printing press. I have a very large Victorian cast iron printing press. I have large desks for working at and a shower door that I use to mix my inks on. I mix inks on glass, and using an old shower door gives me this vast expanse to use when I’m mixing colour, which is a sort of big part of what I do.
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Outcrop
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 70 x 29 cm | 27.5 x 11.4 in
The whole aim of the studio is to make for a good workflow. Print is not a static process, like painting where maybe you have something on an easel that you’re working on. With print, it’s a constant movement of paper and inks, and it’s very easy to make a mess. So I try to have the studio organised so that I can move things cleanly. I have an old-fashioned drying rack that I hoist up to the ceiling that the prints dry on.
In my typical working day, I usually have a combination of administration and printmaking. But if I’m only printmaking, then I always try to start with a really clear, tidy studio and then I will start either cutting or printing. The studio will gradually get more cluttered as I work, and then I often stop and re-tidy and it helps me to think. I always think of tidying up as thinking time when I’m working. My inking sheet is the one bit that doesn’t get tidied up because that’s always developing into a new palette, but I try to keep on top of things. At the end of the day, I have a proper big tidy up and a sweep. I just find that kind of resets me for the work to come.
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Pebble Beach, St Abbs
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 51.4 x 34 cm | 20.2 x 13.4 in
The Printmaking Community
I think I’ve been unusually lucky in that the printmaking community is incredibly supportive and helpful to emerging printmakers. I had a lot of help and advice on the way, not necessarily all to do with the technical aspect of printmaking. There’s a printmaker called Ian Phillips, who works on landscape pictures and is based in Wales. And I think one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever had came from him. He said, ‘Stop behaving like a woman who has a shed at the end of the garden and start behaving like an artist who has a studio.’ That was a real light bulb moment and really helped me develop as a professional printmaker. It’s very hard to list all the people who have helped me because there have been so many of them. Hopefully I, in turn, can pass on some ideas.
When it comes to keeping secret techniques and sharing them, I tend to tell everybody anything and everybody goes on a different journey. Whatever I reveal about my techniques, I know they are going to be used in different ways by different people. I guess if I had a secret weapon to share, it’s really obvious, but it’s just to look. You really need to look at stuff. It doesn’t matter whether you’re figurative or abstract or whatever, you need to know how the world works.
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Highland Pine, Early Winter
Laura Boswell
Linocut print, 35 x 51.5 cm | 13.8 x 20.3 in
I was blessed with a mum who was a dressmaker and she was very into fabrics and colour. She always used to make me look at colours and describe them, and to look at light and how light affected colour. I kind of grew up in that atmosphere. I spend a lot of time just trying to work out why a rock is different from a tree, is different from water. How is it that a rock looks heavy and that fern looks ephemeral and that that water is moving? You can only do that by just staring, and I do an awful lot of staring. I would encourage everybody just to sort of stare into the middle distance. Your friends will worry about you, but it’s a really helpful tip.
About Laura Boswell
Laura Boswell is a printmaker working with linocut, woodblock and traditional Japanese woodblock printing. She has a degree in Art History/Visual Art from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and is elected to the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers. She has attended three printmaking residencies in Japan, studying woodblock printmaking with master craftsmen and her book Making Japanese Woodblock Prints, Crowood Press, was published in 2019. Her second book with Crowood, Linocut and Reduction Printing, Design and Techniques, came out in early 2022
In addition to her printmaking, she runs a YouTube channel as Laura Boswell Printmaker, devoted to sharing her printmaking skills. Teaching is an important part of her practice and she teaches classes in both woodblock and linocut techniques. Her prints feature in national collections including the Buckinghamshire County Museum, The House of Lords and the National Library of Wales. She also has prints in the Nagasawa Art Park collection and the MI-Lab Print Collection in Japan.
Follow Laura on Instagram
Visit Laura’s website
Further Reading
A Guide to Linocut Printmaking
Daniel Howden: Layers of Momentum
Linocut Printmaking for Beginners – What You Need to Get Started
Top Linocut Tips from Leading Printmakers
Shop Printmaking on jacksonsart.com
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