tuesday

All the invitations are printed, and all that remains is to decorate them with tiny paper bunting, a task I'm actually looking forward to. I like fiddly repetitive activities and it's a good excuse to use up some of the contents of my 'white paper' draw (perhaps my favourite draw, who knows?)

These are just a few of the variations I printed as test pieces; three different card stocks, 4 background alternatives, three colours of ink. I'm terrible at making decisions about this kind of thing and usually just go for trying to do all the options, but I managed to narrow it down. It's really worth making test pieces like this (for me at least) as often things turn out very differently to how I expect. Even though it took me all morning I think it's time well spent as the final one I chose is definitely the right one. Although I didn't narrow down the backgrounds really, and ended up using 3 of them, oh well!

The actual screen printing went surprisingly smoothly. In the past when I've printed wedding invitations for others or large print runs there has always been a blocked bit of screen, or a break down, or botched prints with faint bits, bled bits, blurry bits. But today out of nearly 400 prints (two colours on the front, one on the back) only one went wrong and had to be binned. Very unusual. I'd made double of every screen in anticipation of problems, but really this ended up being a luxury as I didn't have to wait for screens to dry between layers, and instead of being stressful (like printing in a limited amount of time usually is) it's was actually quite enjoyable. Could've been because I had the workshop to myself and could sing as loudly as I wanted...

dandelions

I've finally got round to taking some pictures of some of the books I made for the artist's book fair back in when was it, March. Thought you might like to see them. The book I am most pleased with is the one about dandelions...


The drawings were done on a lovely sunny day, whilst weeding and dreaming in my garden. At the moment it's an overgrown mess, but one day it will be a little paradise I hope.

Its screen printed in dark brown and white, I made the background by painting indian ink on tracing paper over the drawings. This can then be exposed directly to the screen which I think gives it a directness often lost on computer generated images (or perhaps its that I'm no good at computers, who knows) I think its the first screen print I have made that I'm actually pleased with...


After looking through the book the back cover opens to reveal behind the weeds a little plan of my garden, how it is now not how it will be when its done... and then the plan lifts up to show a careful drawing of the dirt that was left in the fold of my sketch book when I finally put the dandelions on the compost heap. You can see more pics here


The whole this can be opened completely to look at all the weeds at once. I've got one framed on my desk to remind me. Go out and do the weeding.

adventures

Over Easter we travelled to Ireland for the wedding of one of my best friends. To the south west coast, through the green hills that reminded me of home, on to the mountains...

This is the view from our bedroom window, sunshine every day. And the view up (and down) Knockatee mountain...


You can see the harbour where we stayed and the wedding took place, in the distance, and the Atlantic... it was beautiful...


(shhh. that's me on the rear left :) ) The reception was in this amazing old barn, the walls hung with multi coloured scarves and hangings, candles and rose petals and weeds creeping in at the windows...


Reminded me a little of my latest screen prints... Perhaps it's all the weeding I've been doing recently...


Happy days

a moon book

Whilst I was playing around with my moon screen print I printed some of the final layer in white onto some recycled card that I had been saving for who knows what (like you do). It's a lovely soft brown colour with little flecks of colour through out; reminders of its colourful past I suppose.


Anyway, I decided to make the prints into book covers with the moon wrapping right around the book and across the spine...


I'm really pleased with this little book, the subtlety of the white on speckled brown is hard the photograph (these are the third attempt!) but it works well. The folded edges make it sturdy and durable. The moon appears in the light. It feels nice in my hand.

You can see more here...

birds

Curlews and a bittern. Positives I'm drawing for a screen print....

Experimenting with truegrain... (you can just about see the separate layers for the beak, legs and feathers at the right hand side)

Next, these will be exposed to a screen coated with uv sensitive emulsion to create a stencil, and then I need to decide on some colours...