Studio blog: spring floral lino prints

I was in the mood for creating some new greetings cards to send to friends and family, and so decided on a small series of spring flowers. Inspired by the flowers coming up in my garden, I carved out a snowdrops design and two different daffodil designs from lino.

The daffodil designs I created the other year, but the snowdrops design was created this year, and was based on these sketches of the snowdrops in our garden.

I decided on two different looks for the carvings. The first, which I call ‘negative carving’, was carving out the details, so that when printed, the ‘drawing’ is the colour of the paper and the background can be printed up in many different colours. I chose this method for the snowdrops and the stylised daffodil. For the more realistic daffodil, I decided on ‘positive carving’, where all the background is carved away, leaving the ‘drawing’ behind to print up.

Here’s the ‘positive carving’ in progress:

I treated myself to some Cranfield Colours Caligo SafeWash oil based inks for these prints, and was so pleased with the colours and the smooth ink coverage on the prints. First off I printed up some plain black and white prints.

Then I started mixing up some fresh, spring colours, and spent a good couple of hours printing!

It was a real joy to work with the new inks and I really could have gone on printing for hours more.

If you would like to join me to create some spring floral lino prints, then I have a workshop coming up on 11th April (2026). You can find out more here.