Dorset Arts Week 2012 - Exhibition at Poole Printmakers

Dorset Arts Week started this weekend and Poole Printmakers have a beautiful selection of prints on show including a handful of mine.

The workshop will be open from 26th May till 8th June, with loads of beautiful affordable prints to buy & the opportunity to have a good look round the workshop and see artists at work.

Prices for framed original prints range from just £25 to £300.

Here are some snaps of the exhibition in the quiet before the opening:

For more info see the Poole Printmakers page here - http://www.poole-printmakers.org.uk/DAW_Page.html

For more photos see my Flickr set or Facebook page

Monkeys - linocut in progress

Here are a few shots of my latest linocut edition in progress. I'm creating this as a reduction print, which means I use just one piece of lino and cut it down after each colour before printing the next.

Snap of the print after the 1st two colours have been printed, a pale yellow and quite a bold blue:



After all the prints have had the blue printed I cut away the Lino ready to print the next colour, green. The thing to remember is that you need to cut away everything that you want to remain the previous colour, i.e blue in this case.
Here is the print with the green plate added:


After cutting away again the next colour was brown, here is a shot of the roller & glass slab where I'm preparing the ink:



And here is the Lino block ready to print the brown, you can see the card template I'm using for registration in this shot. It's got strips of card to line up the Lino with, and pen lines to mark where I should place the paper. This is how I manage to print each colour in the right place on top of the previous colour. Registration is a tricky business & there is always some slight difference in each colour - which adds to the handmade quality of the prints, and makes each one unique!


Here is the print with the brown added, looking almost finished!


Just one more colour to go, here is the Lino being cut down for the last colour:


It's always a bit scary cutting away each time, there's no going back!

At the moment I'm still waiting for the brown to dry before I can print the last layer.... watch this space.

You can also Follow me on Facebook to see all my latest work in progress.
And have a look at my Etsy store for all my available original prints.

Tiger tea time - edition of 33 linoprints

Yey, I've completed my first ever relief print edition!

I decided to base the print on a quick sketch I'd made using 'MS Paint' a number of years ago:

After redrawing the design I thought it might be nice to stick him in a jungle setting (I didn't realise how much work that would mean at the time!). I used 3 lino blocks for the image - one for orange, one for black and one for yellow & green (I used a reduction technique to cut into the background yellow block to create the green block). Here are a couple of images of the print in progress:

And here's the final print:

With a handful of slightly imperfect prints, I ended up with just 33 finished prints in the edition. Not too bad for a first attempt and I've learnt a lot along the way. Here are some of the things I'll be trying to remember for my next print:

• Reduction should improve registration (i.e. all the colours will line up more easily if each colour is printed from the same lino block.
• Cut the full picture before testing. It's much harder to see where you're cutting after it's been inked!
• Use paper cut outs to mask big areas of the lino that shouldn't be printing (i.e sometimes the cut sections of lino pick up ink that you don't want to print, cover these up with clean pieces of paper before printing).
• Plan carefully! - Make sure you know exactly what you need to cut away at every stage.
• Wear gloves - printmaking is a very messy business but wearing gloves whilst inking up means that you should be able to keep the print edges clean. And it will cut down on repeated washing of hands.

I'm hoping to enter my little tiger into a couple of printmaking exhibitions later in the year, but until then he's available to buy online from my Etsy shop:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/98769525/tiger-tea-time-signed-original-hand