The Image Before the Print

Elisabeth is self-taught, and she is honest about the difficulty that brings. She did not receive the formal training she wishes she had in anatomy or perspective, so she has had to work harder to build those skills herself. Sometimes she takes reference photos. Sometimes she poses in awkward positions to understand how a body should sit inside an image.

But her process begins before all of that.

When an image arrives in her mind, it does not come flat. It comes with atmosphere. She can almost smell it, taste it, feel what surrounds it. Then comes the difficult work of translating that inner image onto paper.

“You never quite get what you had in your head,” she says.

That gap can be frustrating, but it is also where the work happens. The first sketches may be rough. She describes some of them as dreadful. Then, through each version, the composition sharpens. The movement begins to settle. The image gets closer to the thing she first sensed.

Her practice is also shaped by film and animation. She watches movies while she works and thinks of images cinematically, often as black-and-white films with occasional inclusions of colour. Her pictures do not feel still to her. She sees them in movement.

“You have to be a bit of an actor,” she says, thinking about expressions, gestures, interaction and the world around the figure.
That sense of movement is visible in her work. Even when a linocut is fixed on paper, it can feel like a scene caught mid-motion.

Fairy Tales, Tolkien and Worlds Still Unseen

Elisabeth’s imagination is full of worlds she would still like to explore.

Tolkien is important to her, though difficult, because she grew up with illustrations that already shaped the way she sees those stories. Brian Froud, one of her favourite illustrators, made such a deep impression that it can be hard to escape those images when approaching fantasy.

She is especially drawn to books and legends that have not already been over-illustrated, because they allow her to form her own inner image. She would love to make work around Arthurian legends. Greek mythology also calls to her, and she has already made a Circe print inspired by Madeline Miller’s novel. She loves that piece, even if it is not one of her bestsellers.

There are many other possibilities: Grimm fairy tales, Dracula, ghost stories, personal worlds of her own. Yet because printmaking takes so much time, she is careful about what she chooses.

“I prefer working on personal stories,” she says.

That preference matters. Elisabeth does not want to simply reproduce someone else’s world. She admires artists who can make fan art while keeping their own style, but she finds that difficult. She would love, for example, to be asked to make work connected to Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild, but she knows there would be challenges “I love the art direction so much I struggle to unsee it”.

For her, every artist should try to build their own identity.

“Don’t try to imitate other artists no matter how much you love their work,” she says, “try to nurture your own perspective and the way you see the world, try to interpret what emotionally resonates with you”