Folktale & Fairytale Linocut Prints

Feathers & Folktales is the website of Diem Dangers, artist, folklorist & printmaker offering beautifully handcrafted folktale inspired linocut prints that remind us of our ancient kinship with the wild. Featuring animals and magical creatures from folklore alongside wide variety of botanical elements, each piece contains a precious offering from the past, a mythos, that enlivens our sense of enchantment with the natural world.

 

Linocut Art

A linocut is a type of relief print, that preserves the ancient method of traditional hand carving and the age-old technique of handprinting. A pattern or image is hand-carved out of artist’s linoleum which is then rolled with ink, and paper is hand-pressed on top to reveal the final art print.

Hand printing from a block of carved linoleum that has been rolled with ink.

Hands carving a block of artists's linoleum into an image of a dragon and a crane with a nest of many eggs

Carving the block of artist’s linoleum with a gouge tool.

Particularly unique is the gouge tool’s capacity to etch out fine feathers, strands of fir and scales on a fish as well as details such as the bark of a tree or blades of wild grasses enabling these distinctive textures from nature to come to focus.

The texture from the hand carving and variations in ink density from printing by hand gives the resulting artwork a rustic charm and timeless feel lending itself well to folkloric themes, and folktale motifs.

Details showing the carved block of linoleum and the final print of Baba Yaga, a folk heroine and wilderness creatrix from Russian folklore. The design includes characters and elements from the folktale inside Baba Yaga’s body.

 

Diem Dangers is A Linocut printmaker, ARTIST & Folklorist

I love using the age-old technique of hand-carving and hand-printing to create visual reminders of the mythic wild inside us. Through my artwork and writing I explore the enchanted folklore forest of our collective human heritage using ecospiritual and mythopoetic perspectives. These timeless and enduring folktales offer us a poetic lense through which we can rediscover the intertwined root system of buried human connections and our deep belonging to this wild and precious planet.

 

NEWest prints

These archival quality linocut prints are 100% originally designed, carved, inked, handprinted and packaged by hand for you from a small home studio.

 

Featured Blog posts

These timeless and enduring folktales offer us a poetic lense through which we can rediscover the intertwined root system of folkloric synchronicities, our human-to-human kinship, and our deep belonging to this wild and precious planet.

Featured
Magical Turtles and Mystical Swords: Twin Legendary Kings from East and West

Remarkably, Great Britain and Vietnam have a shared mythology surrounding a mythical King, a mystical lake, and a magical sword. The mythologies surrounding King Arthur and King Lê Lợi are so astonishingly similar, it is as though they are woven together with a silk thread into belonging with each other. In our disenchanted and divisive world, a synchronicity like this - if we allow it to be our guide - invites us to consider the mystery and interconnectedness of the world. These twin mythologies weave us back into relationship with the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World.

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Boreal Bears and Feral Females: Twin Bear Folktales from East and West

The Norwegian folktale “East of the Sun West of the Moon” and the Japanese (indigenous Ainu) folktale entitled “Crescent Moon Bear” are folktales featuring fearless young women who dare to engage in greater intimacy with a bear whether it is marrying a bear, or having the courage to pluck the whisker of a bear. Both involve traversing a formidable boreal forest landscape to save their husbands from a “spell”. These folktales are so strikingly similar in theme and shared values, giving voice to their parallel nature deepens our sense of interconnected history, and rekindles a feeling of belonging to a shared storied boreal landscape, weaving together people, bears, ancestry, stories and hearts. . .

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Fox Woman: The Shapeshifting Woman at the Threshold Between Worlds

Fox Woman, also known as Kitsune in Japanese folklore, is a shapeshifting trickster character who resembles the elusive, clever fox from the wild. Although this folktale comes in many different variations and her story is told in many tongues, what they all have in common is a trickster character who shifts between human and fox, sometimes androgynous, living in multiple worlds, questioning the order of things through her mischief, playfulness, wit, deception, magic and defiance of authority. The tale of Fox Woman is almost always makes visible the tension between the need for order, and its reinvention.

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The She-Wolf Inside Us

There is an ancient folktale from the desert Southwest about “a woman who was a wolf who was a woman” also known as “Loba Girl” or Wolf Woman who climbs the canyons, and sifts through the arroyos or dry riverbeds, gathering wolf bones over which she sings, until they spring back to life and run off laughing with the voice of a woman. Inspired by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ retelling of this story in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, this folktale invites us to call back to life those buried and discarded parts of ourselves, so that we can find our true voice again.

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