I’m quite pleased with this one. The image of a white tree on a black ground is something I’ve been trying to do for a while now, and not managed to my satisfaction. I did this partly as an excuse to use the new white ink (Graphic Chemical printer’s ink – though having switched to a tin and spatula with the black, going back to the stiff metal tube for the white is painful) – or to put it another way, I got the white ink so I’d feel impelled to use it! The paper is Fabriano Tiziano, which is technically a pastel paper, but is also the best coloured paper I’ve found. The black handmade paper I posted about a while back is very nice, but it’s about as lightfast as your average Ringwraith, so no good there. I’m not sure about the rating of this stuff, but it’s got to be a great deal better.

I’m not so good at the symmetry thing, being thoroughly right-handed – it’s much, much easier for me to draw the network lines going up and to the left than it is to draw them up and to the right. The right hand side of the tree is much more fluid and less cluttered as a result.

Elly (my girlfriend) was watching me do some printing the other day, and asked if she could have a go just as I was thinking about suggesting it. (Especially since I’d just picked up some Ellie Poo paper…) Here’s the results. It’s turned out rather nicely.

I haven’t been posting for a while, because Various Circumstances pretty much entirely took away my creative impulse. It’s getting better now, though, and I’ve been doing some more printmaking. Partly, the impetus for that came from a visit to Falkiner’s, and the discovery of three really nice recycled art papers.

The one in the centre there is Fabriano Ecologica – it’s bright white, with a good middling texture, comes in two grades (Sketching and Drawing – Schizzi, Sketching, is 120gsm, and Drawing is heavier so I left that), and comes in A4 pads of 80 sheets for £6.50, which is a really good bargain for acid free good quality art paper. It’s made entirely of recycled post-consumer materials using renewable energy; the pack quotes “more than 50% of the energy used for producing this paper is hydroelectric”. There’s inevitably going to be some secondary bleaching of the pulp, but still.

The one on the right is Redeem 130, which is a good solid, hard-textured paper with a pleasant parchment-beige tint. It looks like it will be extremely good for computer printing. Pleasantly, it’s also extremely cheap!

The third, which I’ve been wanting to try out for some time, is Ellie Poo paper, which is as the name suggests made from elephant dung. It’s lovely tactile stuff, with small vegetable inclusions and a warm pale beige colour.

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 the print done with a spoon, as promised. It’s slightly different paper (from my stock – I’ve not been keeping as good track of it as I’d like to, so I’m not completely sure whether this is Fabriano Accademia or Atlantis Heritage Woodfree).

Notice the sheer amount of ink on the flat areas, and the way all the internal cut ridges show up – they got just as much ink on them in the first one, but the baren didn’t press the paper down into them in the same way that the hard, solid spoon does.

There’s something special about using white ink – I’m not quite sure what it is, but it’s there. This particular ink – Daler-Rowney FW – works well on leather, which is why I originally picked it up, but of course it’s ideal for black paper too. (And much less cliched than using silver ink.) This is some particularly nice handmade paper, very heavy and rough-textured, from Nepal. The design’s much more open, with fewer & thinner lines, than I normally do, but I think it works.