There’s something quite special about varnishing a piece. On the one hand, it makes the colours glow and shine, jump out at you and grab the eye. On the other, it’s the no-changes-now point—once the varnish goes on, there’s not much you can do to change any problems.

Rationally, of course, that’s false – this varnish needs three coats to get the effect I want, and it’s easy enough to intersperse a correction. But it’s still a powerful state-change.

I’m doing this for a craft fair I’m attending—the Mad March Fair, at the Queen’s Head pub in Rye. If you’re in the right part of South-East England on Saturday 26th March, drop by and say hi! I’m taking prints, jewellery, masks, and some of these notebooks along, and I know there will be a lot of other amazing craftspeople there too.

If you noticed a service interruption in the last few hours, that’s because I was transferring this blog over to WordPress instead of Blogger. Google are no longer supporting publishing via FTP, so I had to find something else – since I was already using WordPress for Cold Iron & Rowan-Wood, my SF blog, I decided to go with what I knew for this too. If you get any hiccups, let me know.

Let’s see if this is going to the right place.

I’ll be moving servers fairly soon; if all goes well, nothing should go noticeably wrong, or even noticeably anything.

I used to write a lot more than I do now – I haven’t been able to do this on a regular basis for quite a few years. So enjoy this one.

We understand the world through ink and light;
we draw, we see, we draw again
as faith becomes our paper, hopeful-bright.

Mathematics helps us get it right,
models all that is within one brain.
We understand the world through ink and light.

Which is most important, brush or sight?
We glance from world to model, back again,
and faith becomes our paper, hopeful-bright.

Each drop of ink transforms the paper – white
becomes a sheaf of colours with each stain.
We understand the world through ink and light.

There’s close-packed worlds in everything we write -
a thousand contexts that we can’t explain,
for faith becomes our paper, hopeful-bright.

Our dear friends help us share in their delight -
they show us how to see a truth again,
to understand the world through ink and light.
Our faith becomes our paper, hopeful-bright.

Apparently so!

Right, time to replace the lorem ipsum with some actual text. So I’ll start by answering the basic question: why this site?

Briefly, I decided it was time I tried to take my art & design work more seriously, and that trying for a bit more (and more formal) exposure would help that.

Everything is my own work – the logo’s done with a digital camera and the Gimp. The font used is True Golden, from Scriptorium – it’s based on William Morris’s Golden Type, which he used to set News from Nowhere and other works around the same time. The only other software I used preparing things is Scribus, an open source desktop publishing program – I try to use free open source software where I can.