My print shows two draft horses that are harnessed together, getting ready to work. I engraved the design onto a piece of plexiglass, then added ink and rolled it through a printing press to create an intaglio design before adding watercolor. My piece was inspired by my passion for horses; I have ridden horses my entire life and am currently training for competitions this summer. My goals for this work were to emphasize texture, line, and depth as realistically as I could. While making this piece I learned how to control value through pressure and the concentration of mark making. I’m sure that my passions for art and horses will continue to influence each other in the future.

My piece is a six color reduction print that has five layers of carving. I drew inspiration from a photograph that I made in 2020 of Mount Drum from the Glenn Highway. I created this piece by first carving away the pieces that I wanted to stay white, such as the clouds and the snow. Then I printed the yellow and blue layer by inking half of my block with yellow, and half with light blue. Then I carved away the pieces that I wanted to stay yellow or blue. I repeated this process all the way to the darkest color – a green so dark that it is almost black. I made this piece in order to become more comfortable around reduction printing. Reduction printing used to make me anxious because there is no going back once you have carved a color away and once you have started carving, you cannot ever pull that print again. I really enjoyed making this piece and I think that it eased a lot of my worries over having no chances to re-do the prints. I also kept imagining that I was painting and that helped. I am very happy with how my piece turned out. I think that the colors work well together and my registration was very accurate. I also think that the light green showing through the gray road creates an interesting sense of texture that I like.