Whilst I’m only about 20% pagan at the best of times (most of the rest is Quaker) I still like to keep the High Days, and today was Imbolc. Or, for the Christian side of me, St Brigid’s Day – patron of poets, blacksmiths, and healers, and always one of my favourites.

My normal artistic practice on High Days is to try and make something new – the rule is that anything I make has to be kept or given away, rather than sold. That’s partly just to make sure that I remember why I’m doing this, and as a reminder to try new things or go back to techniques I haven’t used in ages.

Today, I started out by playing around with some two-part epoxy putty, and there’s some jewellery hardening across the room – a stick pin, three brooches, and two choker slides. The brooches I’ve done before, but that was years ago, before I acquired a Proxxon drill for sanding and buffing. (Vorsprung-grade German engineering, slightly better than Dremel in its class.) There is almost no craftsman’s task I hate more than sanding things by hand, and consequently I’m not very good at it. Late tomorrow, or in a few days, they’ll be ready to paint & varnish, and we’ll see how they turn out.

After that, I started playing around with some colour/paper/glaze combinations I hadn’t tried before, and this was the result. It’s Ara dark bronze acrylic on Gmund bierpapier (Boc), with three coats of lightly gold-tinted Rheotech gloss gel glaze. I was rather impatient, and put the second & third glaze coats on when the first was touch-dry instead of properly clarified, but I rather like the clouded effect in this case – it looks like a faux-nori finish, which entertains me.

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.

The design and text are screenprinted, the frame is screenprinted and then overpainted to give the broader deckle.

For this one, I made a screen framework from scrap mountboard and stapled the screen onto it. Note to self – do not attempt to block it out in the same colour as the sharpie you use to draw the text on.

I used another scrap of mountboard for a squeegee – oddly, it’s remarkably difficult to find an actual squeegee around here. I’m sure I remember seeing them in all sorts of places, but when I’m actually looking for one…

The printing process went well, and it gave quite a lot fewer artifacts than the stencilling did. (Though, to be fair, that might also be down to taking more care over blocking it out.) One thing I did see was a set of blobs on the right-hand side, just outside the frame – that’s the other reason I overpainted it, of course.

It’s hard to make out with my crap photography, but there’s an interesting 3D effect on the second half of the text – a grey drop shadow to the right. I’m not sure whether that’s down to blocking or lifting or driving paint underneath, since I was standing on that side and spreading paint towards me.