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.

This is a new technique for me, but I think it’s worked out. The pendant is a 35mm square of artist’s mountboard, covered in something like six layers of acrylic paint and varnish (well, gloss gel glaze – it functions perfectly as a varnish, with the added advantages of being more durable and less sticky on skin than picture varnish) with a ribbon loop glued on the back.

This is a collage piece I made for the Eastercon art show, pretty much entirely as an experiment. It’s one of my favourite SF short stories, Omnilingual by H Beam Piper (Project Gutenberg link) done using your basic papier-mache technique on a Daler board base. The discolouration is done with two layers of tinted glaze (gold, then brown) and edged with black acrylic. I’m quite pleased with the result, and I think I’ll have to do some more of these in the future.

This is another version of the same dragon – I resized a cleaned-up version of the black & white outline I did, printed it out onto some parchment-textured paper I found in my stash, and then inked it. Literally inked, that is – the green & red are calligraphy ink, applied with a pen, but the bronze outlining is acrylic paint.

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.

Further to last, you won’t be seeing a scan of the failed print after all – it occurred to me that I had some clay shaper tools lying around, and that they might work nicely for applying printer’s ink by hand. It turns out that yes, they do, so I laid some of that over the outside frame and the central oval, and will leave the webwork light and ghostly.

This will make it take even longer to dry, of course, but never mind that.

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.

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.

This is something I made for Elly, which she’s quite pleased with. It’s made from 10mm double-satin ribbon, fastened at the back with a tiny buckle, and the eyelets for the tongue are just punched through and edged with varnish for strength. (Mind you, I need to redo them, because this was a bit of an experiment and I’ve found a better method – acrylic paint then varnish) as a result.

Photos by Nick Metcalfe. All rights reserved.

A friend asked me recently to do some concept artwork for the Church of Om, before a service to be given at the Discworld Convention – specifically, a vaguely Buddhist-style mandala. Here’s the result.

Photo taken by Nick Metcalfe. All rights reserved.