It’s September, and therefore high time for are-people-talking-about-Christmas-already?-bah-humbug season.

I make & sell Christmas cards, and can happily supply you with some to send to your friends, relatives, coworkers, archenemies, or complete strangers, at the bargain rate of £1 per card, or 20 for £18 plus p&p (from the UK, if you’re not) if I need to mail them. These are digitally printed on high-quality matte stock (Fabriano Ecologica: acid-free, 100% recycled, very white, and made in Italy using hydroelectric power) with pigment inks. The back has my logo on, and the insides are blank for your own message. They’re A6 when folded, so they fit perfectly into standard C6 envelopes.

I’m happy to do versions with custom text on, and I’ll probably be posting at least one more design over the next month or so, and a downloadable PDF for those of you who have your own printer and very little disposable income.

There’s no minimum order, and I’m happy to mix designs in any way you like. If any of you are interested in hand-printed woodblock or linocut cards instead, let me know in the comments and I’ll try and work up a design; they’re likely to work out between two and four times the price of the digital ones.

Like every other printmaker out there, I get misprints of different degrees of horrendousness whenever I try and do something. I’m lucky; I get more good prints than misprints. But that doesn’t mean I like waste, so I’ve been looking for things to do with the discards instead.

Since I discovered that Mod Podge works really well as a sealant for water-soluble printing ink, without picking it up and smearing it around, I’ve been trying out a few things, and this is one of the results.

As I posted about before, they’re lacquered and laminated paper, strong & flexible, with ribbons to tie at the back. You can find the Etsy listing here.

I wanted another design to use on cards, and I have a pile of wooden blocks the right size, so I went back to those for it. It’s always hard adapting to carving wood again after doing a few projects in lino or vinyl, and the tools slipped a few times, but part of the reason I do printmaking is to deal with my inherent control-freak perfectionist tendencies. I love the way the medium both benefits from them and subverts them.

Here’s the initial design (click through to Flickr for a larger version); you can see some of the changes that happened as a result of “rescue” carving after my sankakuto slipped.

Here’s the block carved and ready to print, and below you’ll see another print from it on white paper. (Arches Velin, which is incredibly tactile stuff, and can give wonderful surface effects. The one at the top is on Fabriano Tiziano pastel paper, which I find works really well for relief printmaking.)

I’m going to have to experiment more with this particular mix of curves and connecting bars, I think, but probably on lino rather than wood. Since I started printmaking, I’ve been doing bordered designs much more often than open ones, which has been a bit of a surprise to me. I’d like to speculate on unconscious artistic or philosophical reasons for that, but I suspect it’s because when I’m planning a design it’s easier to work inwards than outwards.

This has now found its proper home, and the lucky winner has very kindly given me a photo to post.

Sounds like a silly idea, but it’s actually a really good material—tough, lightweight, and durable. That black & silver choker is made from Fabriano Tiziano pastel paper, folded & laminated, and then very thoroughly varnished. It ends up very like thin leather, but it’s entirely vegan. (Not all papers are; most art paper uses animal gelatin for sizing. Fabriano use acrylic sizing, though.)

I’d made a couple of these already, without having had the time, or a model, to show them off properly, but these two were done (and put into my intermittent prototype giveaway bonanza) as an experiment to see whether I could attach a D-ring to the underside in a secure and decorative fashion. The answer, it turns out, is “yes”—the knot at the back isn’t going to be proof against a hard tug, if any of my customers were prone to do such things, but even if I’d put a buckle in the D-ring and strap would still be quite strong enough.

I’ve also been making more of these pendants—they’re artist’s mountboard with a ribbon loop, very light (barely a gram each) and rather tough. The design is Roberson liquid metal ink, done with a No. 6 italic nib.

I’ve been away in the Scots Highlands, and my camera broke on the second day of my two weeks. So that’s my best attempt at recording the view from my bedroom window on Eigg. (HB pencil, with a bit of post-processing so it’s visible, because I sketch very lightly.)

I’ve been back for a while since then, and haven’t managed to get much artwork done. Bits here and there, but that’s all.

Permanent acrylic, works well with a dip pen. Much less flow than Daler-Rowney FW, so I can get much thinner, closer lines, and doesn’t separate out—the pigment loading on the paper is much better. This is their dark silver, on DR Murano Holly paper.

This one was inspired by reading the Silmarillion, and remembering holidays in the islands of Western Scotland. From the southwest tip of Mull, you can look out to sea and see the Atlantic curving away into forever over the shoulder of Iona. I’ve posted some of them in my Etsy shop. The one at the top there is actually from the second set I did—originally, the plan was to do them all in white on black, but that ran into two problems.

First, the white ink was giving me a lot of trouble—it wasn’t gluing the paper down nearly as much as the black does, so I was finding it quite a bit harder to keep registration and avoid getting messy ghost images. That was a problem with the Fabriano Tiziano I normally use for black (shown at the right) and even worse with the Arches Velin Noir I’d got specially for this. It’s incredible stuff, a really rich deep sexy black, and a nice rough texture—but the combination of that and the white ink, which had been oiling out slightly, gave me a great deal of trouble, and I managed about one good print in three from the run. Secondly, I found the sharp contrast a bit much—with that density of line, it gave a very different impression from the one I’d had in my head. I went looking for coloured paper (I’d been planning that all along, but hadn’t thought of using black on colours until I saw how the white on black had come out) and—unsurprisingly—it’s very hard to find paper the colour of a Highland sound in late summer. The blue at the top is Daler-Rowney Murano “Dusk”; this next one is Fabriano Tiziano “Sugar”.
This is actually the first time I’ve re-inked a block with a different colour of printer’s ink, rather than using acrylic as I’ve tried a few times. Since it was black over white, not the other way around, it worked out—in fact, the black woke up some of the white (it had been a few days, so the block was dry) and you can see white foam on the tips of some of the waves in the “Dusk” print at the top.

This one was truly horrendous to ink & print from. I ended up cutting away most of the plate rather than simply leaving the raised area, since the sheer size of the open areas means it’s almost impossible to avoid inking the cutlines and then rubbing the paper down onto them. In the end, I managed to pull a half-dozen good prints, but produced quite a lot of offprints in the process – I’ll have to find something interesting to do with them. My normal reflex for this sort of thing is to cut scraps, varnish the hell out of them, and turn them into earrings, pendants, or the like, but this ink doesn’t take varnish well. I’m going to experiment with a protective coat of spray varnish before putting the good stuff on, but that will take a warm day and more energy than I have right now.

Here’s the first of the pieces of epoxy jewellery I posted about recently, modelled by its happy new owner. The image links to a larger closeup view. When I’ve passed over the other two to their final destinations, I’ll see if I can get pictures of those to show off too.