Why Linoleum?

When I read art technique books they have a tendency to treat linocut—carving in linoleum—as something to do before carving in wood. It is as though they make the assumption that relief carving should be done in wood and linoleum is somehow lesser.

I disagree. Linoleum is easier to get a hold of and less expensive than nice carving wood like pear. When carving it you do not have to contend with the grain of the wood. Its just easier to work with.

The one benefit that I see with wood is that it can hold smaller details than linoleum. So, yes, if you are doing something like a star field with small spread out points wood will do that better than linoleum. However, with my carvings I find that, as long as I'm careful, linoleum can hold more than enough detail for what I want.

I Can't Draw

I recognize that most artists (outside of photography) are very good at drawing. I am not. I periodically work to get better at drawing. But I don't have anywhere near my 10,000 hours. I maybe have 100 hours in?

My primary way to get around this limitation is to trace things instead.

Here we have a picture of my daughter at the beach when she was six.

I'll take that picture and print out a low quality black and white version of it.

With that printout I'll put it on my light box, cover with a sheet of tracing paper, and have at it. Between the combination of the low quality printout and the haze of the tracing paper the contrast on the image seems to take a couple steps up. It becomes clear what lines need to be there and what doesn't.

Then with the trace done it's time to transfer it to a linoleum block. The tracing paper does all the work. It has an ability to barely hold on to graphite at all. So, I just lay it on the block and apply pressure with a wooden spoon.

The transfer is never perfect. Some cleanup is always needed but it's never very much.

From that point on it just comes to carving it out of the linoleum.

Ink and print and you get something like this:

What's in a Name?

Hopefully, search results.

My name is Jeff King. But good luck searching Google and finding me. Jeff King gets more search results than Bill Gates.

When I decided to make a business out of my art I realized I was going to need to do something about this. I was going to have to find a new name.

An engineer by training I decided to be methodical about it. I went online and found a random name generator. I sat down with that for a couple hours looking for names that I liked. I also made sure that a website with that name didn't exist and that it had less than one million search results on Google.

I came up with a list of about ten. But that is clearly nine too many.

I enlisted the aid of my friends to help me narrow it down. I created a simple online survey and asked people to select all the names they liked. There weren't any real winners. But, there were a clearly a couple of loosers.

That survey me down to four.

From there it was just spending a couple days saying them in my head till I finally decided that Michael Banister was going to be the one for me.

The rest was all mechanical. I filed for a fictitious name with the state of Pennsylvainia (where I live). It is the same type of form you would need to fill out if you wanted to have any type of business that doesn't have the same name as you. Say you wanted to open a store called Jim Bob's Pots and Things. Then in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, unless you are forming a corporation, you would need to get a fictitious name.

So, now, I am legally both Jeff King and Michael Banister.

And if you found this website though a Google search—then it was all worth it.