Digital Decontruction
Inspired by the bold lines and graphic simplicity of relief printmaking, this collection explores California's architectural heritage through digital drawings that think like linocuts. Created with iPad and Apple Pencil, each piece captures historic farmhouses, lighthouses, forts, and gold mining towns with the stark contrast and deliberate mark-making of traditional printmaking—but built pixel by pixel instead of carved into linoleum.
These aren't sketches or studies. They're fully realized digital drawings that honor the printmaking aesthetic while embracing the flexibility of digital tools. The results feel tactile and handmade, with the energy of something carved and inked, even though they exist entirely in the digital realm. Plans are underway to bring these back into the analog world as actual relief prints.
Digital Deconstruction Origins
This series started behind a beautiful Victorian farmhouse in Bolinas, California, where I spent two nights camping. The woman living there is an artist and printmaker with a studio on the property, and being surrounded by her work got me thinking about relief printmaking—the bold contrasts, the intentional negative space, the way a linocut reduces a scene to its essential lines.
I didn't have carving tools or a press, but I had my iPad. So I started drawing her farmhouse in that style, thinking of it as a digital linocut. The process clicked immediately, and over the last year, I've kept going—capturing old farmhouses, lighthouses, historic forts, and cityscapes around California, all rendered with that same graphic sensibility.
There's something satisfying about working digitally in a style born from physical carving. Each line feels deliberate, each area of black or white a choice. And while these live as digital files for now, I'm planning to create analog print versions—bringing them full circle back to the medium that inspired them.
