I had this one sitting on my worktable for quite a while, waiting for me to cut the block after I’d sketched it out, then waiting for me to finish it. After I’d done four prints from it (all that’s printed, rather than painted or drawn, is the black outlining) it took me a while to work out just what I wanted to paint, and how I wanted to decorate it.

The colour panels are acrylic paint, the details over them done with calligraphy pens.

For sale, any reasonable offer considered.

Incidentally, I apologise for a lack of printmaking posts – I’m carving another complicated block, and it’s taking ages. Mostly because it’s horribly repetitive.

I’ve actually got a second – well, a sheet of carving vinyl – sitting ready-ish to be carved, but I’ve been debating over adding more detail to it and if so what. Thinking about it, I’m inclined to go ahead and cut it like this, with some fairly large open areas, rather than filling them in with knotwork. (It’s a version of a Celtic high cross, or market cross.)

It looks like the ink transfer from the block to the paper is much more sensitive to bumps in the paper surface than it is to the permeability or otherwise – I prepared a silver-blue background the other day, on black handmade paper with quite a rough texture, and even quite a thick layer of paint didn’t smooth things out enough to get even a halfway useful ink transfer.

I did a print from my cartouche block onto it, and got very scrappy, patchy transfer – you can just about make out the design, but not much more. For comparison, I dropped a sheet of printer paper on the block afterwards, without re-inking it, and took a clear if very textured impression, so it obviously wasn’t anything to do with the amount of ink on the block or what I was doing with the baren.

When it’s dry (which will take a few more days, on an impermeable acrylic surface) I’ll scan them both for comparison.

I did this last night, on some faux-parchment paper I had lying around. It’s done with Japanese carving vinyl, and I’m quite pleased with the way most of it turned out – the four styles of interlocking lines distinguish themselves nicely, and I managed to get cutlines where I wanted them and not where I didn’t. (Cutlines – the traces from clearing vinyl from the blank areas, rather than the relief outline forming the main design.)

However, I managed to do something bloody stupid, which is that I forgot completely that the design would be mirrored. Normally it doesn’t matter with my work, but this particular one completely fails to work when the pattern goes anticlockwise instead of clockwise.

Here’s a version flipped sideways in the Gimp, to show how it would have worked if it had, you know, worked at all.

I did half a dozen prints onto different papers, and learnt one other thing doing this – the flower petal inclusions in the nice handmade paper aren’t very firmly included.

After this, I decided to try printing onto an acrylic-painted surface. It turns out that it works rather well, but takes quite a bit longer to dry – I suspect I can generalize from that to say that the drying time depends on the absorbency of the paper beneath.

Here is the result, which is now framed and hanging on my kitchen wall. (Mounted in a simple A4 clip frame, with a sheet of neutral-grey acid free paper between it and the mankboard backing.)

I don’t feel I can sell high-days prints, but I’m happy to give prints from this block away to good homes.

Yesterday was Lammas, or Lughnasadh if you prefer. It’s mostly an agrarian holyday, but I was brought up a pastoralist (Welsh hill farming isn’t really so concerned about the grain harvests) so the only aspect that really speaks to me is the sunlight. I started carving the block as the sunlight faded, and was printing these over midnight.

Linocut on smooth white drawing paper, and on blue rough-weave handmade paper.

I did this as a substrate for mixed-media pieces – specifically, I wanted one to put on the cover of my laptop. It’s done from katsura onto some rather nice Indian paper (this piece has cornflower petals – I also did plain white, grey, and medium grey-blue, and haven’t decided which I’ll use yet) without dampening it.

Originally, I was intending the network to be much more vine-like, but I’m not unhappy with the way it turned out.

No, I haven’t stuck myself again – this one is muscle strain from a few hours with the carving tools. I’m working on the largest, most complex block so far – katsura, designed to print onto A4 paper.

But still, I’m most of the way through the final pass. It takes more or less four, after the design’s been drawn on – first I cut out the gutter around the edge, and neaten up the outside edge of the printing area. Then I scoop out the white areas with the komasuki (U-shaped gouge – 5mm and 3mm depending on the size of the area) and/or the kentonmi (registration chisel – a standard straight-edged flat chisel. This is very much not what it’s intended for) and after that go around again with the komasuki to deepen the holes and neaten up the edges a little. The final pass is with the sankakuto (ninety-degree V-shaped gouge – an amazingly useful combination of chisel and scoop) to neaten up the edges properly and eliminate as many random splinters and inappropriate angles as possible. It’s also particularly good for steepening the cutouts, which is good for this one because I want clear white areas without cut marks this time.

I have only a rough idea what the final product is going to look like at this stage – well, obviously I know where all the lines are supposed to go on the macro-scale, but on the millimetre scale it could do almost anything, and that’s one of the things I particularly like about printmaking. It almost completely sidelines my natural fussy-perfectionist tendency, and leaves the print with an unpredictable vitality.

Quick post to note down where I’ve been getting things from – mostly, Atlantis Art in Whitechapel, and Intaglio Printmaker in Southwark. The latter is a bit of a trek to get to, especially in a London summer, but it’s worth it. For those of you (most of you) outside London, both places do mail order of course.

On my first trip to Intaglio, I picked up a set of cheap Japanese carving tools (hangito, kentonmi, sankakuto, and two komasuki); some water-based ink for relief printing (oil-based is a bit more traditional, but I hate working with oil-based materials unless I have to); some battleship lino and a couple of pieces of katsura (gorgeous sexy Japanese softwood, carves wonderfully); a small roller; and a few large sheets of Velin Arches paper. This made a perfectly adequate set of equipment for kitchen-table printing, though I had to use the back of a large spoon as a baren. (A proper baren, and some of their carving vinyl, were top of the list on my return visit.)

Prices: a piece of lino six inches square is £1.70, and the vinyl is £2.05 for a piece 200mm x 300mm. (That’s what I did this on.)
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The katsura (10mm deep) is £4.81 for the same 200mm x 300mm, or £1.35 for six inches by four – that’s what this is on.

I’m currently lusting after more paper, but I want to use up more of what I’ve got first. I also have some gorgeous-textured handmade Indian paper, in various colours, that I want to try printing onto – I just need to finish carving the block I started the other day. When my finger recovers a bit.

I did these with another vinyl block, and discovered a couple of interesting things. The first is that – since the vinyl blocks are only 3.2mm deep, it’s almost impossible to avoid getting ink on the higher ridges outside the “official” design – it gives me interestingly unpredictable bits outside the edges. And if I try to eliminate them all, I end up going right through the block.

The second is the response of this particular paper – Atlantis heritage woodfree paper, 315 gsm, quite smooth and hard-surfaced – to soaking. The first image was done with dry paper, the second moderately-soaked – what I did was stack half a dozen pieces of paper up on a waterproof surface, giving each a thorough squirting with the plant mister before dropping the next on, and wiping off the surface water before dropping each one on the plate.