A smack of Jellyfish

My latest 'term of venery' print is done! This linocut shows a smack of jellyfish. The collective noun for a group of jellyfish is a "smack". This amuses me, because I imagine them smacking their tentacles together in some sort of deepsea high five. To be honest, marine biologists speak of 'blooms' and we do tend to lump in a bunch of soft-bodies marine creatures into the term jellyfish, all of the gelatinous zooplankton (there's a term for ya) in fact.... but 'a smack of jellyfish' is the traditional term of venery for a group of such creatures. I've included only those translucent, tentacled umbrella-shaped creatures, which are truly jellyfish, or the major non-polyp form of individuals of the phylum Cnidaria.

The typography I designed for the words represents their meaning; "smack" mimics the motion of a smack with the letters colliding; the word "Jellyfish" is made of tentacle and bell-shaped letters.

These linoleum block printed jellyfish are printed on Japanese kozo, or mulberry paper. The block is inked 'à la poupée', meaning the multiple colours (blue-black, navy, pale violet and pink ink) are all inked at the same time, in small areas, and the print is pulled all at once. Each print is 15.5" by 12.5" or 39 cm by 32 cm in dimension. There are 8 prints in the edition.