A lifelong artist, Claire Rohweder grew up in Minnesota as the daughter of a musician and an architect who nurtured her creative side. Her career is in art education, and though she recently moved to Southwest Florida to take a job at the Children’s Museum of Naples, she had been coming to the area for at least a decade, falling in love with its natural environment.

She started The Lady Printmaker to create cards, prints, stamps and other crafts. Growing up, her family took frequent camping trips, so much of her art now is reflective of her love of the outdoors: a mix of snowy scenes from the North along with reptiles and wildlife from her new home in Florida.

Rohweder largely sells online through her website (ladyprintmaker.com) and Etsy. Because she’s a full-time educator, she does most of her work on the weekends. She has experience in many artistic forms, including photography, but she’s drawn to the solitude of the printmaking process.

“I find it so satisfying and relaxing,” she says. “It’s kind of like a meditative process.”

The process can be delicate and time-consuming. She starts with a drawing. Then comes the transfer process, where she hand-carves the drawing into the wood block that she’ll use to make the prints. That can take up to 10 hours at times, given the degree of precision necessary. Then she starts to ink the block and transfer the image onto paper.

She focuses on the emotional connection to an image — meaning she may have been inspired by a photo she took while camping, but the result is ultimately about her emotional connection to the scene. From there, she just hopes it resonates with other people.

“I create what I enjoy, then put it out into the world,” she says.