When she moved from Florida to New Hampshire in 2011, Deb Caplan, a lifelong creative, was thrilled to find that her new hometown of Peterborough was a major hub for for creativity and the arts in the Monadnock region.

“I love living around here. There are so many creative people,” she said. “It’s a big art community, and Peterborough is very much a part of that.”

But as she admired local artists’ work, she noticed a trend.

“One of the things I noticed when I got up here was there’s a lot of beautiful artwork, and a lot of talented people,” she said.

However, since a lot of that art is original and one-of-a-kind, it wasn’t always an affordable option for many people.

“So my idea was to make prints that were affordable to the people,” Caplan said.

Under her LineScapes NH brand, Caplan has her pen line art of locations and landmarks in and around Peterborough for sale as prints on her website and at the Toadstool Bookshop. She also offers custom line art “house portraits” that she prints and digitizes for use on a variety of media. Caplan suggested greeting or post cards, and added that one of her clients had used her art to make a mug, a mouse pad and even a phone case.

Caplan said she was inspired by Louis Prang, whose work she studied while earning undergraduate degree in art studies and art history at Brandeis University. Prang pioneered lithography printing techniques and sold inexpensive prints of famous artwork – “one of his things was to make fine art available to the public,” Caplan said. “So that was the genesis of the idea for the prints of Peterborough.”

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While selling her art has never been her main source of income – she has a background in recruiting, human resources and library sciences – she felt she learned a lot about pricing and selling her art during her time in the Boca Raton Museum Artist Guild while she lived in Florida, where she contributed to one of the museum’s galleries at Delray Beach.

“Pricing your art is a really difficult thing. It’s tough – I’m taking a shot and investing so much with the hope that I’ll get that investment back,” she said. “It’s sort of a leap of faith in your work.”

About six years after starting LineScapes NH, Caplan is about to take another leap of faith as she starts branching off into what she referred to as “free-form art” – “more fine art, less commercial stuff,” she said.

But she’s not moving away from line art or prints. She loves the medium, so she will be producing more abstract line artwork to print on high-quality, textured card stock, which will be double-matted and sold in limited editions of 20. Her goal is to have the work ready to present and sell by the weekend of July 4, in time for the eighth annual Art Walk in the Park in and around Depot Square in Peterborough. She also plans to sell items at the Peterborough Night Market on Aug. 20

In recent years, Caplan has dedicated herself to her 2-D art.

“Whatever I do, I overdo,” she said. “Bottom line is, I get very involved with something for a period of time, then I like to move on – and sometimes I come back to things.”

As an example, she displayed some of her line art that she had made 15 years prior, even before moving to New Hampshire, but emphasized that line art isn’t the only medium she has experience with.

Prior to moving to Peterborough, she worked mainly in 3-D, making sculptures out of clay. Unfortunately, she said she hasn’t been able to work with clay since she moved because the process is messy and she doesn’t have a place to sculpt in her home. She lamented the 2019 loss of the Sharon Arts Center, but was excited over the recent opening of the MAXTMakerspace Dublin Ceramics center, where she has already taken a class.

“Now I’m getting itchy to get back into the clay a little bit,” she said.

People can order prints, magnets and custom line-art prints at linescapesnh.com.