With steady hands and an unwavering gaze, Craig Mitchell hunches over a small work table in his brightly-lit studio in Reno, oh-so-carefully carving intricate patterns into large linoleum stamps.
Mitchell is a Northern Nevada and Lake Tahoe landscape artist. For decades, he captured dramatic sights across the region in oil paint on canvas, but in the last few years, he's turned to a new art form: block printing.
It's an intricate process. He carves out a series of large stamps - usually about nine - inks them in different colors, and sends them through a press one layer at a time to transfer the image onto paper. Each stamp illustrates a different piece of the picture, and it all has to line up perfectly, or the artwork is a loss.
Though he took a single block printing class decades ago at UNR, Mitchell says that when he decided to get back into the art form, he re-taught himself all the skills without any outside influence, and he's happy with how it's going.
"It wasn't something that I struggled with in the beginning," he told 2 News Nevada. "I, for some reason, feel like I was made to do this. And that's one of the reasons I want to keep doing this."
On a daily basis, Mitchell spends hours on his work. He tests the colors and stamps proofs until he's satisfied with the results. While he could hypothetically create hundreds of copies of the same landscape image once he's perfected a block print, he prefers to run most of his prints only a few times, creating a limited number.
His landscapes range from familiar scenes of Silver State sagebrush, to the glistening waters of Lake Tahoe. Mitchell says he's been in awe of the region's beauty since he first crossed the Sierra almost 50 years ago as a teenager.
"My parents had an old Lincoln Continental. I'm in the backseat, and I'm looking out, and I saw, I saw the snow out near Boomtown as you look up on the other side, and I just thought, 'Wow, oh I can't wait to live here!'" he said.
Just as Northern Nevada has had a big impact on his life, Mitchell has also had a big impact on Northern Nevada.
He's the artist who designed the modern-day UNR Wolf Pack logo.
It's a claim to fame that Mitchell doesn't share that often. He says he had a fun time designing the well-known snarling wolf's head, and he's proud of the work, but it's a brag that he prefers to keep close to the vest.
"I don't really want everyone going, 'oh, he's the guy that designed the Wolf Pack logo.' I really would prefer them to say that he's the guy that makes some really beautiful art," he said.
At heart - thanks to the support of his wife and a small group of loyal clients - Mitchell says he will always get to introduce himself first and foremost as a landscape artist.
