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 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.

Linocut, roughly 200mm square, posted in my Etsy shop.

This was inspired by a conversation with a friend about druidry, and remembering the mountains of Snowdonia where I grew up. It wasn’t originally intended to be a night scene, and it’s turned out a lot smoother and more Art Nouveau than I’d intended – I want to revisit the sketch with another block, probably in relief next time rather than incised, and see if I can get something closer to my original vision.

I don’t normally make separate design sketches – I usually do my designing straight onto the block – but since I did this time, here it is. I copied it freehand onto the lino, since the original sketch had slightly the wrong proportions for the block I had handy.

That’s the first proof from a block I’ve had waiting on my workbench for ages, waiting for me to work out how the top of the dragon’s head should go. Since I took some WIP pictures of the block, here they are – first, while it was waiting, then all finished and ready to ink.

And this one’s all inked up and ready to print. The masking tape is there to stop as many as possible of the traces of ink on the open areas getting transferred – as you see from the proof, it’s only partially successful.

As for where next – I’m happy with the image itself, but I need to do more work on the open areas, and get a more consistent transfer of ink from the right-hand edge. The effect there is partly down to the surface of the block – it’s standard with water-based ink on a new vinyl block, and tends to tone down when the block’s built up a suitable layer of ink over time – but I’m fairly sure it’s also in my brayer technique. One of these days I really must find some others in different sizes.

Linocut, done directly with the sankakuto without any preliminary drawing. The brown one is Gmund Bierpapier (Boc) – recycled art paper made from beer. How awesome is that? I’ll tell you how awesome it is. It is AWESOME. The white one is, I’m fairly sure, Fabriano Academica.

This piece was inspired by one of my favourite things in the V&A – a ceramic plate made around 1955 by a Japanese artist, Kitaoji Rosanjin (1883-1959). Their official record has no image, so have this less-than-optimal one I took there yesterday.

I carved this block quite a while ago, but was disappointed with the effect just using printer’s ink. When I decided to try the gold I’d mixed up, though, it looked much better – the texture and gleam give the design much more depth. Of course, I’m also using heavily textured handmade paper here, so that makes a difference too. This is some rather nice khadi paper – it’s not even slightly lightfast, sadly, but I don’t think that makes a difference here.

I took an old printing block – my Celtic Cross block – and made up a large glob of gold acrylic, mixed with fabric medium, to use with it. The consistency is a lot thinner and sloppier than printer’s ink, so it’s harder to control, but that’s part of the fun of it. Apologies for phonecamera pics rather than scanning them – these will dry quicker than normal printed ones, but not this quickly! These are both on Fabriano papers – first Ecologica (Schizzi grade) and then Tiziano black. I also did two onto Gmund bierpapier, which came out wonderfully, but since they’re reflective gold/black on dark brown they’re impossible to photograph till I have proper daylight.

I don’t generally bother cleaning my blocks after use, and just leave the (water-based) ink to dry and form a surface layer for next time. The acrylic paint was actually softening and re-awakening that, and it all prints together, giving a really interesting textural effect. Obviously, it’s not actually printing a layer of black underneath a gold wash (the other way around, if anything), but that’s what it looks like. It’ll be interesting to see how the technique works out on a clean block that’s never been used with ink.

The acrylic stays wet and usable on the block much longer than I’d worried it would – that might partly be down to the fabric medium, which I added because this was mostly a test for printing directly onto T-shirts and so on. On the other hand, it might also just be because acrylic is still completely capable of colour transfer when almost dry.

My first try at drypoint with watercolour pencils has given fairly encouraging results. Not very attractive, but then the idea was to answer the question, Can I print in watercolour without a press?, and it’s definitely that.

This is my first time working with a drypoint needle, so one of the things I learn from this is that I have to use it much more authoritatively. It’s a great deal like using a pencil, and lack of pressure is one of my besetting sins when doing that, too. On the other hand, these transparent plastic plates are wonderful, and I’m already planning several things involving tracing images through them. Well, mostly wonderful – it’s difficult to see where your lines are going without strong direct, and preferably low-angle, light on your workpiece, so that’s going to take some getting used to.

I only have a set of very low-end watercolour pencils, so that’s not going to give ideal results, but they’re still giving quite good transfer to the plate. The scratched portions have about as much tooth as rough paper, but the unscratched portions have none at all, so it’s really easy to confine the colour to the correct areas.

When printing, I used Ellie Poo paper, since I had some A4 sheets of that lying around ready to hand; I sprayed it thoroughly with water, and wiped off the surface excess before laying it on the plate. As you can see from the smear in the corner, the water doesn’t glue it down in the same way that printer’s ink does, so that’s going to take some getting used to. More relevant, though, is that wet 90 gsm paper is very prone to wrinkles and distortion when rubbing (I was printing with a spoon – really ought to use a press, but I don’t have access to one) so it’s important to rub only from the centre outwards, rather than back and forth across the paper as I normally do.

Next time I try this, I’ll do a test with some Ingres paper and with some actual watercolour paper – that’s designed for precisely the same distortion problem, after all.

As I posted here, I experimented a bit with monotyping. Since I’ve finally managed to get a decent picture of it, here you are!