Tag Archives: woodblock

London Rowan

By Somhairle | Published: September 8, 2011

There are half a dozen rowan trees along my road; they’re something I used to see a lot back in Wales, and not a tree you’d expect to find here. I’ve been taking photographs of them over the last year or so, and recently I took one of them—from last February or so—and commenced some [...]

Posted in printmaking | Also tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Curves & grids

By Somhairle | Published: June 21, 2010

I wanted another design to use on cards, and I have a pile of wooden blocks the right size, so I went back to those for it. It’s always hard adapting to carving wood again after doing a few projects in lino or vinyl, and the tools slipped a few times, but part of the [...]

Posted in printmaking | Also tagged , | 1 Response

Golden gridwork

By Somhairle | Published: December 21, 2009

I carved this block quite a while ago, but was disappointed with the effect just using printer’s ink. When I decided to try the gold I’d mixed up, though, it looked much better – the texture and gleam give the design much more depth. Of course, I’m also using heavily textured handmade paper here, so [...]

Posted in printmaking | Also tagged , | Leave a comment

Monotyping

By Somhairle | Published: August 28, 2009

I’d been vaguely aware of the existence of monotyping before, but until I found an old copy of The Painterly Print in a Notting Hill second-hand bookshop I hadn’t really considered trying it out. It’s a good way to use up the leftover ink I dollop out onto my glass plate after doing a batch [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

T-shirt printing

By Somhairle | Published: July 14, 2009

I’ve been experimenting today with block printing directly onto fabric, and it’s come out pretty well. I used my cartouche block, with the same printer’s ink (incidentally, using a 1lb tin and a spatula instead of a squeezy metal tube makes things quite a lot easier) and a metal spoon to make sure the ink [...]

Posted in printmaking | Also tagged , | Leave a comment

Cartouche network

By Somhairle | Published: July 13, 2008

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 [...]

Posted in printmaking | Also tagged , , | Leave a comment

Second woodcut

By Somhairle | Published: May 23, 2008

For this one, I decided to try cutting out areas to leave a raised line, instead of gouging out the lines of the design as before. It’s harder work, but a lot of fun, and I can see it gives more opportunity to use the wood’s nature.

Posted in printmaking | Also tagged | Leave a comment

Printmaking – woodblock experiment 1

By Somhairle | Published: May 16, 2008

Lessons learned from this one – firstly, that printing from wood really isn’t the same as printing from lino. Having a solid block rather than a flexible piece of lino to work on is good, but it also leaves me open to edge effects. I also need to use quite a bit more ink than [...]

Posted in printmaking | Also tagged | Leave a comment