#but printmaking is a really valuable thing to do as a beginner artist if you get the chance

[wild-at-mind]

Saw an artist on instagram saying that their digital art is often looked down upon or considered ‘cheating’ by people interested in buying it, and almost kind of campaigning for digital art to be taken seriously...I honestly thought we’d left that one behind in the 2000s on deviantart, but then I had a look at their page and it’s clear that their work is very specifically meant to look like printmaking, mainly linocut and block print. I don’t think anyone should be weird about it but I can also see that linocut is often beloved for its aesthetic because of the very physical process of creating the print block, the imperfections that often result becoming part of the image. So perhaps this is a problem with buyers assuming they are getting a print made on a physical press using a physical block, rather than a print from a printer? I don’t know, it was interesting to see them kind of sloganning this issue when it may be quite specific to their style. I’m no stranger to digital art meant to look traditional and I know about all the advantages of this, and I especially like to use digital oil paint and watercolour effects, so this isn’t me being a traditional art snob. It just strikes me that this may be a case of the market for your art style being the market that wants handmade prints. Mind you now there is risograph, which an exhibitor at a small press fair kindly explained to me- a way of layering ink on the page using a printer and a digital file, so you can create the style of a linocut/lithograph without a printroom. I think many people still haven’t heard of it though. I wish this artist well and think their style is very interesting, but also I think most digital artists probably would not deal with anything like the flak they say that they get, so not a very universal issue to slogan.