It can be tough finding your style whether that's dress sense or art.

I started creating Lino prints as a hobby on my kitchen in January 2018. I’d been a mum for long enough to realise that I had lost sense of what made me tick and needed to do something for myself.

It’s now April 2023 and I’m 5 years into selling my art (something that just kind of happened) and my style has changed massively over that period of time.

Let me take you through this changes…

2018 - Where it began

It seems like yesterday.

In early 2018, I would sit on the sofa with a Lino gouge, tray and piece of Lino and carve while watching the telly. I didn’t process most of what a=was on the screen because I was so absorbed by the Lino.

I wouldn’t recommend this approach - you end up with a sore neck and back and the light is terrible!

Off I’d go to the kitchen where I’d squeeze the ink onto a plastic tray and mix a pretty colour before rolling It all over the Lino block and getting excited for the peel back. There was no thought given to Timelapse's, videos of the reveal or well composed photos of the finished print. It was just exploration.

But then friends and family starting buying them and I set up and Instagram account. With a few commissions requested, I began to carve what other people were asking for (and charging very small fees for it too). It was essentially a hobby that paid for itself.

I hadn’t yet found my style but I was enjoying the process.

Here are a few of my 2018 prints.

2019

Early 2019 saw me experimenting with printing on fabric. I created my own handprinted fabrics with small Lino blocks and the patterns that came out of my experiments were joyous. People loved the bags but I just couldn’t create them for a price that gave me a profit so that was a short lived venture - but one that I loved and has impacted on the workshops that I do.

2019 was the year I tried to expand what I was offering. I looked at trends and created prints that I thought fitted in with those. I still enjoyed the process but my heart didn’t really sing with the designs because they weren’t coming from my joy.

In the summer of 2018 I had been on holiday to Spain with my husband and little girl. It was a much needed break from the tiring home life being a mum with a young child and teaching. When we turned up, the apartments were completely covered in hibiscus flowers of all colours. The smell was incredible and the colours were so uplifting.

I spent the next couple of evenings painting the pink hibiscus.

The painting stayed in my sketchbook for ages before I finally became brave enough to embark on my first multi block print in Jan 2019. It was a far cry from what I’d done before and, by this time, I had moved on from using water based inks to the more expensive but infinitely higher quality oil based Cranfield Colours inks. Here’s how it came out.

Here are a few of my 2019 prints.

2020

2020 was they year I tried to make sense of what I had created so far by collating my pieces into collections. There were plants and animals all over the place.

I was totally in love with the Honey Bee print from 2018 and the Hibiscus print from 2019 and the Olympics was due in the summer. A conversation with my husband lead to me reimagining the honey bee in bronze silver and gold for the olympic medals and on a red spot for the host countries flag. “Genius” I thought but you know what happened that year so the olympics was delayed. Still, I was totally in love with the metallics so they ended up in everything!

Here are a few of my 2020 prints.

2021

2021 was tough on all of us. We’d been through a lot with the pandemic and it had sucked the joy out of life. Needless to say, I was feeling uninspired.

Another chat with my husband pointed out that I was just in an admin spiral and the creative activities has vanished so I challenged myself to create a seasonal floral print every month. It really did help me to get out of my funk and brought some much needed creative spark back into my practice.

I played with mixing watercolour techniques with Lino print, which brought me a lot of joy and made my customers smile too.

Here's the full range of monthly mini florals.

2022

Something really clicked in 2022. There were many contributors to this - working with a coach and getting out more certainly were high on the list - but mostly I think I had gone through the creative cycle I needed to to realise that I needed to stop following trends and make what I love. After all, one of my core values is Joy and, in order to share that joy with my customers, I need to have felt it while in the process of making.

And so emerged the sea theme in my prints. A more abstract approach, inspired by the sea but driven by my emotions and love of colour to represent mood. I was feeling excited about making, choosing colour palettes instinctively rather than being a slave to the photos I’d taken on my inspiration walks.

Here’s the 2022 Seascapes Collection.

2023 - What’s to come

This year, I’m working on more sea inspired work and exploring more emotive and season inspired colour palettes. My work is becoming increasingly abstract but still obviously draws on sea waves.

To follow my progress and hear about release dates, join my mailing list. When you join, you get access to all my free guides in the VIP area of this website and also receive a discount code for your next purchase.

Comment below with any questions you have. I’d love to chat with you.

In the coming month’s, I will be at a range of markets and pop up events (check them out in Events) and will be selling some of my older pieces at bargain prices that you won’t want to miss.