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.

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.

This is the first stage of an attempt to illustrate the firework dragon Gandalf conjures for Bilbo’s Party at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. I was inspired by these posts on Tor.com, where Kate Nepveu is blogging her Lord of the Rings re-read. I’m going to colour it, but I wanted to post the black and white version first.

• Interlace art in sculpture (5Mb pdf)
• Wikipedia on Insular art – the fusion of Viking/Celtic knotwork, Germanic animal-style, and Christianity. I need to try some of this.
• Specifically, something like this…