Gratuitous Orange Roller Sunbeam Close-up

Gosh, its been over a month since the last post. How remiss of us. The wet July weather has meant lots of evenings and weekends stuck inside, which has at least allowed us to get on with some new projects. The main one of which seems to have involved buying lots of secondhand Penguin books!

Inspired by the Selenium print I did for the Periodic Table Project (see earlier posts), I've started another camera based print, this time using the Twin Lens cameras of the 1950s and 60s as a starting point. Its a woodcut in four colours from two blocks. Or rather two sides of the same block, which I thought might make registering them at least a bit easier. Here are the 4 different backgrounds which were printed in dribs and drabs over the last couple of weeks.


And this weekend I've printed the first of the three 'detail' layers, starting off in light grey, to be followed by two darker shades of grey to fill in the rest of the camera and outline the various knobs and levers. There were about 40 in total (prints, not knobs and levers, no camera's that complicated, surely?) all inked and burnished by hand as usual. No mean feat with my small girlish arms!


There is also another little wood engraving on the go, this one of St Winifred's Well in Shropshire where we spent a wonderful week at the end of April. Here it is, relegated to the far corner of the dining room table (the only part of the room that gets any natural light). The magnifier was a chance purchase off ebay, weighs approximately 4 tons and doubles as a spectacular lighter-of-candles if the evening sun comes in at the right angle. Hopefully this block should be finished and printed, at least in proof-form, by the end of the week, so look out for updates, the next of which should appear in less than one month this time!


Currently listening to: Joanna Newsom, The Milk-Eyed Mender

The Box Man Cometh

Last weekend we tidied up the garden, which had been battered by several heavy storms. In the process we discovered we had far too many tomato and squash plants for our tiny patch, so decided to put the spares on Freecycle. They were soon snapped up by a very nice man, who by chance happened to be a cabinet maker with some surplus-to-requirements boxwood lying about in his workshop. Five plants for two nice little bits of seasoned boxwood seemed like a good deal all round!


The hard, closely-grained wood of the box tree has long been prized by wood engravers as the best wood for detailed engraving, and these days is very expensive and hard to come by. Our pieces will need to be cut and polished, but at this stage I think we'll leave them the shape they are rather than cutting them into neat rectangular blocks. Watch this space to see what happens!

Currently listening to: Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.

A new toy...

Periodic Table of Printmaking Update

Jenn Schmitt's Periodic Table Printmaking Project (which we contributed to back in April - see this post) is gathering pace. There are a really nice variety of printmaking styles and processes in the project, and you can see the current state of completion on Christopher Clark's splendid webpage (click the image below to view the page).

Bank Holiday Fun

After a long hot April here in Norwich, May has been almost uniformly cold, grey, wet and miserable! Hooray! Welcome to Britain! We don't mind it, and the garden has especially enjoyed all the rain so all is green and bountiful at Spoonergregory Acres.

The wet and windy Bank Holiday saw us stuck in the house sorting out various things, including making a rather natty pouch for Jon's new mp3 player! Some offcuts of felt and a strange little mascot from Japanese TV gave us all the inspiration we needed and after an hour of cutting, stitching, swearing and welding we came up with this:


Bless 'im.

Lots of printing works are in the pipeline (watch this space) and we'll have an exciting new addition to our armoury in the summer in the shape of an Adana 8x5 letterpress printing press. We've had a sneak preview and can't wait to ship it up to Norfolk!

Currently listening to: Beirut, Gulag Orkestar

Stuff We Like to Print With # 3

The third in an increasingly erratic series. Today, our trusty burnisher.


People print their relief prints using all kinds of methods. In essence all you need to do is tranfer the ink onto the block, and then off again on to the paper. Simple. In practice its not always so easy. Just pressing the block onto the paper usually results in a patchy mess, some areas overinked and others not inked at all. For those with lots of money and plenty of room the best way round this is to buy a printing press. For the rest of us the answer is hand-burnishing, selectively applying pressure to the back of the paper to press it evenly onto the block and encourage the ink to stick to it. Traditionally this is done with a japanese tool known as a 'baren', some good examples of which can be seen here. Other people (including us on occasions) use the rounded back of a spoon to get the same effect. Clare Leighton, for example, recommended in her 1932 book Wood Engravings and Woodcuts that wood engravers ought to burnish their prints with an ordinary teaspoon in order to get the maximum subtlety of tones from their inking.

The picture above shows our favourite and most used burnisher, an old empty tin of mints. You can see from the state its in how much use it has had, and the way in which the silver covering rubs off is actually part of the appeal. The light coating this leaves on the back of the paper makes it easier to see which areas of the design have and haven't been rubbed, allowing us to judge when to stop and when to carry on. The size and shape of the tin have also proved ideal for our small girlish hands! Its history is shrouded in myth and legend, though rumour has it that it was discovered resting in a vending machine somewhere in Ely while two young printmakers were gadding about in their earlier days...

Currently listening to: Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat

Periodic Table of Printmaking Part 2

As you can see from the pictures, my Selenium print is now finished. Hooray!


This one shows all the stages in the process of printing it layer by layer. The final image was made up of two blocks and three colours. The first block just provided the bright orange background and the lettering, with a space left for the camera. This was carved from a second block, firstly to give the light grey underprinting, and then, after a bit more cutting, the final layer of dark grey to pick out all the details on the camera.

Neodymium will be completed imminently. Watch this space!


See more here on Flickr, and also here on gfoots webpage.

Currently listening to: Half Man Half Biscuit ACD