I am delighted to be heading to Marlborough at the end of November, having been invited to take part in St Peter’s Charitable Trust’s Christmas Fair.
The fair runs from 10am to 3pm in the historic St Peter’s Church on the high street, just ahead of the Marlborough’s Christmas lights switch on.
This is the first time I’ve brought my Ancient Wiltshire themed prints to a fair in the county that inspires much of my work, so I’m looking forward to hearing more memories and stories from those with an intimate knowledge of this wonderful landscape. Expect megaliths, mounds and chalk horses.
I’ll have limited-edition linocut, woodcut and wood engraving prints, cards, digital artworks and perhaps some seasonally-inspired things too.
As part of the varied weekend schedule of demonstrations, hands-on printing and beginners sessions organised by Liverpool Print Fair, I was delighted to lead an introductory workshop on lino design, cutting and printing.
Attendees were introduced to the tools and materials of linocut and to the Grosvenor School artists who helped to bring linocut into the popular consciousness – as both a vibrant artform and as an accessible art practice for anyone to enjoy.
expressive marks in linoInking the blockproofing the bookplate
With books and samples available for inspiration, attendees used offcuts of traditional lino to familiarise themselves with the EssDee lino cutting tools. Beginning with the broader ‘U’ shaped cutters to make expressive marks and patterns, and moving on to look at the finer, detail cutters they would use for their bookplates.
Attendees then rolled ink to the perfect consistency, sample blocks were inked up and proofed by hand, and using the rolling press.
For the final, take away piece, initials were drawn by hand or traced from type sample sheets over a lightbox. Their designs were then transferred to lino blocks – reversed – ready to cut.
With a choice of two pre-cut designs the final step was to slot the initial blocks together and take the final prints.
The final, customised bookplates
Each attendee designed and cut their own nameplate, inked, proofed and took the final impression themselves. The event was supported by Liverpool Print Fair’s partners and sponsors with tools and materials supplied by Cass Arts Liverpool and EssDee.
I last tried etching at art school, and it felt like alchemy back then. I made a sketch of the rooftops visible out of the large windows of the top floor studio of the Victorian building the art school called home. Under the tutor’s direction this became a line etching and later gained some aquatint tones. Extreme caution was observed around acids and rosin boxes, in the print room off the main studio I’d barely been in before.
The print wasn’t great, but I do wish I still had one of them. A memory of how velvety the tint was has stayed with me.
Sadly I never got to do any more intaglio as I moved in the direction of graphic design from that point, and that was becoming increasingly digital.
Safer, modern processes and chemicals have not replaced the traditional ones, but they do offer a much better alternative for revisiting intaglio in the small studio. So I equipped myself with Edinburgh etch chemicals, tools, plates and some modest safety gear to get started again.
Hard ground line etching
Baldwin’s Ink Ground is amazing stuff, I was quickly able to prepare a copper plate by rolling a thin layer on and baking it in the oven for short time. I then began a modest line design of medlar fruits set out on a window ledge to ripen. I underestimated just how fine a line could be achieved, so the results were not as ambitious as they could have been, but they were educative non the less.
A proof of the ‘medlar’s plate in it’s early line-etched state
I briefly improved the design with drypoint, but keen to try other techniques involving the roller again I didn’t pursue this. The burrs raised by the drypoint tool would have damaged the roller on applying more ground.
Sugar lift aquatint
This was equally easy and really satisfying. Freshly rolled ground is treated with a dusting of fine icing sugar before baking, very carefully washed and then etched to produce a fine, somewhat velvety surface. I managed to get a gentle tint to the medlars image in just five minutes.
Burnishing – mezzotint style
Having placed a fine tone over the whole plate I used a burnishing tool to restore highlights. This worked a treat and gave me really exciting scope for tonal control when I start to work on better pieces.
Hand tinting
Hand tinting ‘Medlars’
Next I tried hand tinting – with gouache rather than watercolour – which I don’t think is ideal. I’ll be using a watercolour box for this in future, balancing the opacity with dilution was tricky with gouache – which is otherwise a go-to medium for me. I wasn’t too concerned will colour accuracy so much as working with the line tones so the results aren’t final.
If I learned anything from this it was the importance of considering tints as part of the design process, and to balance tones as far as possible in the etch so that tinting is it’s most effective when simply applied in straightforward washes. The temptation to paint the surface with tones was strong.
Soft ground etching
Finally, I used the ground unbaked and applied pencil marks over a sheet of paper to impress the marks into the ground surface. It worked a treat, I was really surprised by the softness of the line. Etching all the prior marks and seeing the before and after states gives you a sense of what you can expect from the etch. So for these marks on some scrap copper I did not bother to etch them.
Doing it all
It’s been a fun week or so revisiting these techniques, and learning new skills along the way. Being able to design, inscribe and etch safely – without toxic fumes – opens up many new opportunities. But there are some limitations I think, particularly in the difference between rosin and other tint processes which will mean adapting or finding new ways to create those effects. Nevertheless there’s much to be pleased about and I look forward to adding line, tone and tint to my design process.
I’m delighted to be offering this framed reduction lino print for sale online after it debuted at Liverpool Print Fair in late April. This is my first reduction lino print at scale and was both rewarding and challenging to complete.
The subject is a stone built farmhouse, Hammerton Hall in Lancashire. The title is derived from William Cowper’s poem ‘The Task (The Winter walk at Noon)’.
But let the months go round, a few short months, And all shall be restor’d. These naked shoots, Barren as lances, among which the wind Makes wintry music, sighing as it goes, Shall put their graceful foliage on again, And, more aspiring, and with ampler spread, Shall boast new charms, and more than they have lost
William Cowper
This piece began last year with a small scale study linocut in black and white, in order to examine both the architecture and help develop a tone for the final piece. It was clear from this that the sky would form a significant part of the work.
Next I drew out the larger composition directly onto lino from reversed sketches, inking in some tones in blue and black to help establish the mood of the piece.
Inking the design onto lino
The first cut was to take out the lightest tones, the off-white paper serving this purpose. The white areas of the window frames, cloud edges, some metallic and reflecting items in the scene were cut first, and the first ink layer was the lightest warm sky colour.
From there the rest of the sky was developed before moving on to the hall and it’s gardens, walls and trees.
The fellside was added separately before the final layers of the trees, shrubs grasses and dry stone walls were cut.
Pulling an intermediate layer of ‘But the months go round’
The final stages were to add the greens to the foreground, some trees and shrubs and intermittently among the dry stone walls, and the very last addition were a number of layers from a separate block for the foreground branches through which the more distant scene is viewed.
‘But let the months go round’ is available in a limited edition of 12 prints. The first of these can be found in the Print Shop framed in a gilt-effect solid wood frame with a custom mount.
Following Liverpool Print Fair last weekend I’m now adding all the new limited edition hand-made linocuts, wood engravings and digital prints I’ve been working on recently.
Lindeth Tower Garden
Lindeth Tower Garden, Silverdale. 2-colour reduction lino print on 100% cotton rag paper
This was a fun exercise in brevity and abstraction – taking a complex view of a walled-garden with many kinds of trees and shrubs – as well as a Victorian folly – and reducing it to a limited palette on a small scale.
Printed on 100% cotton rag Khadi paper made for much variation.
The edition is limited to 15 prints and is available now in the Print Shop.
Avebury Cove
Wood engraving
Close up through a magnifying glass of the Avebury Cove wood engraving
I was long overdue depicting one of my favourite ancient sites. This is a view of the Cove at Avebury – a complex within a complex. Carved in lemonwood and around 6cm wide, this is now available in an edition of 50.
The design in process for Dorothea – limited edition lino print from the ‘Invisible Cities’ series
This is the first of the cities from Italo Calvino’s novel that I chose to try and describe.
Dorothea is a city precious in the memory of those who pass through it, and I wanted to capture something of how those memories are carried back into the wild.
The second city in my series, this was created digitally following plain old pencil sketching. Sophronia is a city with an interesting custom of separating along surprising lines. A reduction woodcut of this subject will also soon be available online.
There’s still some new limited editions – more from the Invisible Cities and a short edition of my homage to 1980s handheld gaming, which will be added to the shop over the next week or two.
I have been thinking for a while now about developing a series of prints inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Better equipped than before, I am diving into this project head first, with the curse of the pharaohs in mind, and no mention of Venice.
