Cock-a-doodle-doo

This weekend I have finally managed to find the time to finish my cockerel print - carving out the final layer and then printing a lovely dark blue colour. Jon helped with the printing when he wasn't out in the garden, and we're both really pleased with how he has turned out. If only we could have a real one of our own! Maybe one day...

We don't have the space at home for a proper studio so all our printmaking activities take place on our dining room table (helpfully covered by a wipe-clean striped oilcloth). My favourite place to sit and carve is in the chair opposite the window, which gets the most sun. Everything gets moved to one sie of the table (or onto the floor) when its time to print, so we often end up having to eat our tea on our laps because the table is covered in wet prints and other printing paraphenalia.

We've interviewed a fellow printmaker, Ellen Shipley, for the Prinsty (Printmakers of Etsy) team blog - read it here.

It has been very hot and sunny here for the past couple of days, which has meant lots of time in the garden tidying up and planting things out. It's all looking lovely and tidy out there now. This is the first year that we have tried our hand at growing strawberries. These ones are in a hanging basket outside the back door, above the herbs. I've got all my fingers and toes crossed that they ripen!

A wet bank holiday weekend

Another wet bank holiday weekend here (although it was sunny yesterday, so Jon got lots done in the garden), so we have been stuck inside with nothing to do but carve woodblocks, print, eat toasted fruit loaf and drink plenty of tea.

I have been busy carving and printing the next layer of a square print of a cockerel. The background colour and the first layer of his feathers are all printed, so today I did some cutting before printing the next layer of feathers - a dark orangey-red. It is working out very well at the moment, but will probably take at least a couple more weekends work before I manage to finish it.

Jon is busy working this weekend, so hasn't had much time for art - but he is busy coming up with plenty of ideas for his entry for the 71st annual exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers - the submission date for entries is in the first couple of weeks of July and both wood engravings and other types of relief print can be submitted.

Yesterday, when it was still sunny, Jon took a lovely photo of one of our home grown alliums. I only cut one to bring into the house but now I wish I'd cut them all as they have now taken a bit of a battering from the rain...

Drying the dishes in style

This week we have spent our hard earned pennies on some lovely printed tea towels - you can never have too many (not even when they take up two whole drawers in our tiny kitchen). I couldn't resist the pink spotted one with old fashioned jelly moulds, printed by Fran Squires. I have one of her gorgeous aprons too, but I can only wear it when I'm not cooking anything too messy...
We also bought a 'one lump or two?' tea towel from MrPS in Big Blue Sky, a gallery in Wells-next-the-Sea which sells many wonderful things, all made in Norfolk. The postman brought us these three tea towels, which came all the way from the US, from Patapri, one of my favourite textile shops on Etsy. The two alphabet tea towels were designed by Linzie Hunter, and we love them too much to put them away in a drawer, even if it is the drawer for tea towels that only come out on high days and holidays.

This week I finally managed to finish off my little landscape print that has been patiently waiting on the dining room table for a couple of weeks! In our last post I mentioned that the sky had gone a bit wrong the first time round - it has now been (hopefully!) rescued with a thin layer of grey ink, and a cloud.

The end result is a 15 layer reduction print, measuring 5.5 x 5.5 inches. The photographs and the scan don't really bring out all the colours and texture of the overlapping layers of ink very well, but I'm pleased with how it looks in real life, and its given me plenty of ideas for future prints! Now available in our shop.

This weekend has been lovely and sunny, so we've been out in the garden filling up spare pots with summery bedding, and planting rows of marigolds inbetween our rows of veg. The mini greenhouse is full to bursting with lettuce and tomato seedlings, so in a few weeks we can start feasting on our own produce - unless the army of slugs beat us to it...

Stuff we like to print with #4

The fourth part in our erratic series of favourites. Today, some lovely end-grain wood blocks.

We have lots of blocks waiting to be engraved, in all shapes and sizes. Below is a random assortment of tiny blocks, never measuring more than 2 x 3 inches.


We also like to engrave on Resingrave, a synthetic material designed to imitate boxwood. I love the pristine white top layer before a block is engraved - always completely smooth and cool to the touch.


Next, a maple block. This one measures 3 x 5 inches, and is made up of several smaller blocks joined together.


Below is one of our precious boxwood blocks, from Chris Daunt, one of the last suppliers of handmade wood engraving blocks in the UK. If you ever hold a boxwood block in your hands then you'll know why it is such a highly prized wood. Boxwood feels completely different from any other wood, and the blocks are utterly beautiful in their own right, without any additions from us!


Below is a close-up of the grain of the same boxwood block.

One day we might just be able to bring ourselves to scratch its surface...

Cutting

This weekend we have both been doing lots of cutting!

We both find cutting to be quite therapeutic, especially with a glass (or two) of sherry and a favourite CD in the background. After a couple of weeks of day-job related upheaval we both needed to sit down quietly and do some cutting!

I have been working on a new wood block of a wooden peg which is now ready to print. I used one of my new tools, which was very pleasing to use and puts my old blunt ones to shame.

Here I am concentrating very hard on not cutting myself -


Jon has been busily engraving for a commission for a surprise present, so instead of a photo of his current block here is a photo of his magnifying glass. Useful for engraving and setting fire to small bits of paper when the sun is in the right place.

The Periodic Table of Printmaking

The sun has been shining on Norwich almost continuously since our last post, and we have been out in the garden enjoying it - planting potatoes, radishes, tomatoes, chillis, herbs and much more!

We have been working hard on our ideas for the Periodic Table printmaking project - I am doing Neodymium and Jon chose Selenium. We are both doing woodcuts, and started cutting the blocks today! Neodymium is used used to colour enamels and glass, so I based my design on Art Nouveau enamel jewellry and glass designs - the final colour scheme hasn't quite been decided yet, but I'm looking forward to using my new gold printing ink in some way, shape or form! Selenium was used in the honeycomb-style lightmeters of old cameras, hence the vintage camera in Jon's print.


Hopefully they should be printed by the end of the week - the other completed prints are appearing on this web page as they are finished.

Currently listening to: Camera Obscura

Springtime

Spring is well and truly sprung in Norwich now, it was so warm last Wednesday that we had our lunch out in the garden to enjoy the sunshine (before the conker tree comes into full leaf and blocks it out). The first of the purple sprouting brocolli is ready to eat, the lawn's been reseeded and last year's compost looks like being a fine vintage! All this has inspired a suitably Spring-y print, a woodcut of two daffodils (see below). It started out as being four flower heads, but got reduced down to 2 as that seemed to work better, even if it makes it look like they've had a fight and are no longer talking to eachother! Japanese plywood is great to work with, easy to cut but still strong enough to hold sharp lines and fine details. Our tools are a bit of a mixed bag at them moment. The fine lines are done with a dedicated woodcut tool that looks like its escaped from a backstreet surgeon's bag c.1750, while the clearing work is done with some super-cheap chisels from the bargain bin of Norwich's premier alladin's cave of hardware, Thornes. Still, they seem to work nicely together!


Current listening: Adam Green, Jacket Full of Danger

Reeds and Waves

Another weekend, another tiny woodblock engraved. This time a slightly less fiddly design than the Edgefield print, loosely based on many bracing walks by the sea in various parts of Norfolk, Devon and Cornwall. Its nowhere in particular, but there are elements of Cromer, Wells, St Ives, Penzance and even Plymouth in there somewhere! Again only 5 x 3cm. Will need to invest in a good magnifier if this keeps up...


Also finished is Fen Reeds, inspired by our post Christmas walk on Wicken Fen (or at least near Wicken Fen, what with us forgetting our NT cards and not being able to get in to the posh bit).


Our main website is due an overhaul to add all the new prints and generally tart things up a little, so do keep your eyes peeled for that over the coming weeks!

Currently listening to: The Shins - Wincing the Night Away

A smaller block

Spent the weekend finishing off a tiny engraving on an offcut of unidentified end-grain wood, possibly maple, part of the mixed bag we bought a few weeks ago. It felt strange to be engraving on wood at first, after weeks of plastic and resingrave, but it was nice not to have to worry about the surface chipping or lifting away!


The engraving was based on a sketch of fields around Edgefield, near Holt in north Norfolk, from a long walk we had last summer on the Holt-Mannington trail. The simple patterns of hedges and plough furrows suited the small area of the block (about 5 x 3 cm). Printing was a bit hit and miss at first and we tried lots of different methods: laying the block on the paper (with padding underneath) and pressing down with weights, laying the paper on the block and burnishing by hand, and a combination of the two, although this generally meant the block would shift and blur the print as we flipped them. We spent large parts of Sunday night looking longingly at presses on the internet!


While I was engraving on Saturday afternoon Sarah took it upon herself to create a neater way for me to store my tools, which since I've bought them have lived variously in a roll of bubble wrap, in an old Stilton and Port tin, and scattered across the dining table. Now they have their very own little roll, courtesy of some old curtain fabric from Freecycle, and Sarah's 1950s sewing machine (a hefty lump of splendid engineering).