Printmaking personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I started cutting lino because I wanted to repeat an image. I had made a drawing of the flats opposite my aunt's house, all balconies and satellite dishes, and I liked it, but I only had one of it and I wanted to see what would happen if the same block sat next to itself twelve times. That first attempt was clumsy: I cut away the lines instead of the spaces and ended up with a negative I had not planned. Working out why it had happened taught me more about how a print is made than any demonstration had, and I have been interested in the logic of the process ever since.

What draws me to printmaking specifically, rather than painting or drawing alone, is the delay between decision and result. You cut, you ink, you pull, and only then do you find out what you have actually done. That gap forces a kind of planning I find useful, and it also leaves room for accidents that I would never have invented. In drypoint I like how the burr holds ink unevenly, so the same plate gives a rich early print and a ghostlier one later. It makes the edition feel like a sequence rather than a set of copies.

I am also interested in printmaking as something that was made to be shared. Posters, pamphlets, cheap prints pinned to walls: images built to travel. Looking at Japanese woodblock prints in a museum collection, I was struck by how much of their effect comes from flat colour and confident outline, decisions driven partly by what the material allows. I would like to understand that relationship between technique and image far more thoroughly, and to work with etching, screenprint and letterpress rather than the two processes I have taught myself. A degree course gives access to presses, acid, exposure units and, more importantly, to people who will argue with my choices. I want to spend three years making a great deal of work, most of it imperfect, and learning to judge it honestly.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels are Art and Design, History and Geography, and each has fed into the way I work. Art and Design has given me the studio time and the habit of keeping sketchbooks that actually get used rather than tidied up afterwards. For my personal investigation I have been looking at how shop fronts change along one road near my home, photographing the same stretch across several months and reducing the photographs to two-tone lino reductions. Editing a busy photograph down to what can survive being cut has been the most demanding part, and I have got better at deciding early what an image is really about.

History has trained me to read images as evidence and to write about them without waffle. Studying the interwar period, I became interested in how printed material was used to persuade, and I wrote a coursework essay that required weighing sources against each other rather than just describing them. That discipline shows up in my sketchbook annotations now: I try to record what I actually observe about a proof, not what I hoped for. Geography has been unexpectedly useful too. Work on urban change and land use gave me the vocabulary for the subject matter I keep returning to, and fieldwork taught me to gather material systematically, which suits a process based on repetition and stages.

Alongside lessons I have used the college's book press to print by hand, and I attended a Saturday workshop at a local arts centre where we made monotypes on a small etching press. Seeing a proper press at work clarified how much of the result depends on pressure and paper dampness. I have also read Rebecca Salter's Japanese Popular Prints, which explained how blocks were registered and how labour was divided between cutter and printer, and I have followed several printmakers' studio accounts online to see how editions are numbered and documented.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For the past two years I have worked Saturdays and school holidays at a garden centre, mainly on tills and restocking the seed and bulb displays. It is ordinary work, but it has made me reliable about time and calm when several people want something at once. Customers ask questions I cannot always answer, so I have learned to find out rather than guess, and to explain things simply. Standing at a till for eight hours has also given me a sense of my own stamina, which matters for studio work where a plate has to be finished before the ink dries out.

At college I volunteered with two other students to organise our year's end-of-year show in the corridor gallery. My particular job was hanging and labelling: measuring the wall, working out spacing for thirty-one pieces of very different sizes, and cutting and printing the labels. I under-ordered mounting board first time and had to rework the layout, which cost an evening. What I was pleased with was the final arrangement, where we grouped work by scale rather than by student, and several staff commented that the corridor looked less like a noticeboard than usual. It was a small task done properly rather than anything ambitious, and I enjoyed the practical problem-solving more than I expected.

Outside college I look after my younger brother two afternoons a week while my mother works, which means my own making happens in fixed windows in the evening. That has taught me to prepare properly: blocks cut in advance, paper torn to size, so that when I have an hour I can use it. I also swim with a local club, which is the part of my week that has nothing to do with art and is better for it.

A recent independent project involved printing a set of twelve small drypoints on the backs of old library index cards a charity shop was throwing out. The card was too soft in places and some plates bit unevenly, so I kept every proof and numbered them in order to see how the burr wore down. Nobody set the brief, and finishing it without one told me that I will keep working in a studio when the timetable is my own.

This example has 5,840 characters across the three answers. Use it for ideas and structure. Your own UCAS answers must fit within 4,000 characters in total, including spaces.

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