u/gailitis

Hello everyone. I’m a traditional printmaker, and I wanted to share my latest piece, "Decades," as I thought the underlying philosophy might resonate with this community.

It is a modern take on the classic vanitas still life. I was recently struck by a rather bleak realization: if a generation that has grown up with smart devices lives to the age of 80, they will have spent roughly 30 of those years simply looking at screens.

I wanted to place the enduring symbol of our mortality—the human skull—next to the everyday artifacts that so quietly consume our waking lives.

To create this, I used hand-pushed copperplate engraving, a centuries-old technique. For me, the medium is a crucial part of the message. The incredibly slow, stubborn, and physical labor of pushing a burin through copper stands in deliberate opposition to the frictionless, fleeting nature of our digital consumption. It is printed in traditional black ink on antique-toned, German mould-made paper.

It serves as my own quiet reminder to disconnect, to value analog slowness, and to exist more in the physical world. I hope you enjoy it.

Hey everyone. I recently finished pulling the edition for my latest copperplate engraving, titled "Decades," and wanted to share it here.

The concept behind this one has been sitting in my head for a while. I read recently that if a generation born with smart devices lives to be 80, they will have spent roughly 30 of those years just staring at screens. I wanted to do a modern take on a memento mori or vanitas still life, putting the classic skull right next to the everyday objects that eat up our time now—a smartphone and earbuds.

For me, the medium is half the message here. I wanted to contrast the incredibly slow, stubborn, and physical process of hand-pushing a burin through copper with the fast, frictionless way we consume digital media. Building the volume on the skull and the devices through pure cross-hatching took a lot of time (and eye strain), but I'm really happy with how the textures contrast.

I wanted to engrave something simpler this time. It's a Vanitas of a skull, phone and earbuds. The thought I had while making it was: "for a generation that has grown up with the smart devices, by the time they died at the age of 80, 30 of those years would be screen time (roughly 7 hours a day)". Hence the title, not years - Decades.

Hope you like it. Have a nice weekend!

​I ran into so much trouble with this print. The woodblock cracked—twice! I tried mending it, but it became too fragile for the heavy pressure of the printing press. I honestly thought I wouldn't be able to print it at all.

​But I couldn't let the piece go, so I decided to hand-print (burnish) the edition instead. After finally getting my hands on the right paper, it’s here.

​The idea behind "Feast" was to create something that feels like an antique medical illustration. It’s a cracked walnut, but it acts like an exposed skull revealing the brain. The worms crawling out aren't just bugs ruining a harvest. They’re intrusive thoughts—the quiet anxieties, doubts, and noise that take root and slowly feed on your mind. It’s a piece about the mental parasites that drain our energy.

I wanted to share a recent print I finally managed to finish, exploring the line between botanical studies and anatomical reality.

​At first glance, it’s a standard botanical study of a cracked walnut. But I carved the meat of the nut to mimic the delicate folds of a brain, turning the rigid shell into as if an exposed cranium.

​The larvae emerging from the shell are meant to symbolize intrusive, parasitic thoughts—the quiet anxieties, the persistent doubts, and the creeping misinformation that take root and slowly feed on the mind.

​The process itself became a bit of a metaphor. The woodblock actually cracked twice while I was working on it. It became too fragile to withstand the heavy pressure of a traditional printing press, so I had to gently hand-print (burnish) to keep the block from splitting completely in half.