Roy Scholten | 50 Birds

Roy Scholten is a printmaking artist based in Hilversum, The Netherlands. Working in the well-equipped workshops of Grafisch Atelier Hilversum, Roy creates etchings, monoprints, letterpress prints, and combinations there of. For the last few years, he has been especially focused on exploring the possibilities of LEGO Letterpress.

To really find out what can be achieved, Roy set himself the task to design and produce a series of fifty bird prints. A number of rules were self-imposed in order to ensure unity in the series: All birds must be found in the Netherlands, and each bird print in the series is the same size, based on a 16 × 16 baseplate. Within those dimensions, the bird is always depicted in its entirety. The goal was to capture the characteristics of each species within those constraints to as high a standard as possible.

“It took a lot of trial, error, and learning about patience and persistence along the way,” describes the printmaker. Four or five separate print runs / colour separations seemed many in the beginning. Gradually, that number grew to seven, nine, and even up to eleven individual stamps were needed to be carefully sequenced to produce the design. Roy comments; “Apparently, the better you get at something, the more difficult it becomes! Funny how that works.”

Each design was printed in an edition of twenty so that on completion the series had produced one thousand bird prints. In 2024, six years after starting the project, the last print of the Kingfisher came off the press. Together with Martijn van der Blom, Roy published Print & Play. The Art of LEGO Letterpress in 2023. In this bi-lingual book both artists present more than fifty works each, ranging from stylised dinosaurs and birds, to abstract masks, landscapes, and typography.

The complete 50 birds series can be found at royscholten.nl.

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