Hello and welcome

We've started this blog mainly as a way of recording our printmaking experiments, and probably anything else that happens to be in our heads when we get round to writing posts! We started playing around with linocuts last year ago after buying 2 big H.J. Jackson prints to go on the wall in our then new house, and thinking it might be fun to have a go (on a much less ambitious scale). You can see some of our earlier prints on our website. Hottest off the press is the "Squash" print, our first multi-coloured one-block reduction print:


The above picture shows the four stages of printing building up to the final image. Its based on a sketch of a 'harlequin' squash that was 90p from the grocer but never got eaten...

More recently we've branched out into woodcuts and wood engravings. Woodcuts are done on Japanese plywood, which is amazingly easy to cut and gives much crisper edges than lino. Look out for prints coming soon. At the moment the "wood" engraving is being done on engraver's plastic and resingrave, cheap alternatives to the frighteningly expensive real wood end-grain blocks, which will have to wait until we're a bit more technically proficient!

Having hand-sewn a nice brown leather sandbag (filled with lentils rather than sand...) to rest the block on, and thrown caution to the wind by investing in some lovely EC Lyons tools, the first engraving will end up on the front of our christmas cards. (Sneak peak below).



Lovely and sunny here in Norwich today so we'll be off to frolic, take photos and eye up future print material.

J and S.