This week I’ll be discussing artist proofs, how they help and why I think they’re important!

Artist proofs are the prints printed by the artist to see how the final print will look, and to see if anything needs to be fixed for the final print. I have a lot of artist proofs and I love looking back at them to see my progress in printmaking!

The first artist proof I’ll show is one of my favorites that I’ve done. It was close to being a final print, but there some areas I definitely needed to fix. The print is from my “Unicorn on Union” series. It’s a woodblock print, my first woodblock print actually, and it features a Unicorn trotting up a street in San Francisco. I showed one of the final prints from this series in an earlier blog post. Here is a picture of one of the artist’s proofs.

This would have made it into my final prints if it wasn’t for the linework on the unicorn.

My next favorite proof is my little linocut print titled “Aruba”. It features a small smiling cartoon version of my cat. This Artist Proof looks very cool, but just wasn’t what I was looking for for my final print.

My least favorite artist proof I ever did was the first proof I did of my first time trying blind embossing. Blind Embossment is when you print without ink, and just leave behind raided areas in the paper. I didn’t like how this proof turned out. This particular proof features an ox, and its picture is down below.

Artist proofs are so important for printmakers because they show us how far we’ve come from our previous attempts! I love looking at my artist proofs, and I believe they are just as important, maybe even more important than the final prints!