Wisconsin Life

[upbeat music] - Tim Znidarsich: The cool thing about printmaking is the whole process behind the physicality of creating your print.

My name is Tim Znidarsich.

I'm an art teacher and printmaker in Baraboo, Wisconsin.

I specialize in woodcut, which is one of the more traditional techniques, where you use carving gouges and carving chisels to take away part of the surface on the woodblock.

And then inking it up and printing it through an antique printing press, very similar to how newspapers were originally created.

Most of my work is me trying to capture a memory.

[playful music] I create some really quirky and funny images.

I make some really weird images.

[lion roaring] [bird chirping] I do series about odd animals.

I am fairly obsessed with trees.

Ornate flowers.

But I have so many weird ideas all the time that something just clicks and sparks and a whole series will come from that.

I usually start developing my idea on the iPad now.

I never thought I would be that person, but the iPad is such a great tool, especially as a printmaker, for me to make changes to my drawing, to take bits and pieces of different places or ideas or even objects and merge them together.

After I have my image, I transfer it using a type of Japanese wax transfer paper.

That allows me to transfer my drawing onto a piece of wood.

Once I'm done using the transfer paper, there's a giant red outline of my drawing backwards on the woodblock.

And as I'm going and looking at the red lines, I go over everything in Sharpie.

It's kind of like it's your last rough draft before I start the labor-intensive process of carving.

When I'm carving, I find a sense of, like, melancholy.

It's very meditative for me.

It's very calming.

I can feel the pressure of the blade going right through the wood.

I can feel the resistance of the wood on my tools, taking a little piece out and taking more and more.

Hours can pass and like two, three, four hours, like, I'm just, like, in that moment.

And that moment just, like, stretches.

But that ultimate goal is finishing it, and striving to get to that point is what really keeps pushing me 'cause I want to see, is it gonna turn out the way I want it to?

'Cause even if it looks cool as it's being carved, you really have no idea what the print's gonna be until you print it.

[ink brayer rumbling] The final printing process, it's a culmination of hours and hours of all the hard work.

It's the end.

It can be tedious, but the challenging parts of pulling a final print always pays off.

Looking at the final print, it is the big moment where you see it for the first time.

It's exciting.

It's terrifying 'cause you're just praying and hoping that it's gonna turn out what you want.

Once you get it all the way off, you flip it over and you get to look.

There's something so special about that moment that you can feel.

Printmaking is kind of crazy.

It's extremely time-intensive.

You're gonna spend hundreds of hours creating an image, when the actual time to just print it is just a little bit.

But as a printmaker, it's a sense of accomplishment of putting your thoughts and your ideas into such a process-driven art form, and being able to translate that into a completely visual form for others and to know that you were able to achieve that.