Greetings!
Last weekend I tried screenprinting for the first time in a very long time.* I booked myself a place on an afternoon workshop at the David Parr House in Cambridge with Adam Bridgland. (I posted about David Parr back in summer but I still need to go back for a proper tour!)
After a quick intro to the main points of screenprinting and donning an apron, we got cracking.
Normally the art I make involves far too much fiddling around with small details, so it was really refreshing to be presented with some fat brushes and pots of gaudy, gloopy ink. We used screens which already had Adam’s designs on them, to which we could add our own colours, or we could freestyle it on some blank screens. We were using screenprinting to create monoprints (one-off prints, rather than ones that can be repeated).
After a bit of time up close with the hairdryer, I took my prints home with me on the train.
Now I’m thinking about doing another screenprinting workshop, but I’m not sure if it’ll be something I can do at home due to a lack of space and having to wash everything up in the kitchen. But watch this space, you never know.
*I vaguely remember doing some printing when I was at junior school that might have been screenprinting, though probably with paper stencils? We wrote accounts (with Berol Handwriting pen, of course) of our 4th year residential trip to the Lake District and made printed textile covers to go on the books that we bound ourselves! That actually sounds quite exciting now I look back on it… We did bookbinding several times.
I also screenprinted a T-shirt (with a rainbow-coloured puffin) when I attended Guides, which I’ve only just remembered. So I have more screenprinting expertise than I thought.
Cards are back in stock
In the nick of time, I’ve stocked up on greeting cards for my Etsy shop including my peregrine falcon Valentine’s Day cards. So if your beloved appreciates slightly odd humour, why not show them how much you like them with a dead pigeon’s head?
(please note I can’t be held responsible for any negative reactions, or any positive ones)
Other designs are available if you think this one is weird. Don’t be put off.
Another linocut is underway…
Fitting in art around my day job is challenging, especially at this time of year. Work isn’t especially arduous, but it takes quite a bit of effort to go and sit at a different desk once I get home, and not just relax on the sofa. I also prefer to work on prints when I have good light, which really means daylight.
Anyway, I have finally started on a new linocut print design. I’ve done the first layer of ink today and now our clothes airer has 13 prints drying on it (I’ll probably have to move them tomorrow when we do some laundry).
I’m using the ‘reduction’ technique so I’ll be using one piece of lino to gradually print all the colours in my design, cutting it away after each colour is done and printing each colour over the top of the previous one.
Here’s my lino block with the design transferred in pencil, and I’ve cut away the bits I want to stay white.
And here’s my print after the first layer of ink has been printed, using the block above.
Just another half a dozen (TBC) colours of ink to go, once this one is dry…
Bird News
I STILL haven’t seen any waxwings this year. Some have been seen in Cambridge, but not at times when I’ve been able to go and see them. Very inconvenient. If you have seen waxwings lately, please tell me about them.
At home last weekend I was watching birds flying about outside at dusk, in a way that made me think that something was scaring them. Lots of pigeons, doves and starlings were zooming around at high speed. So I stood by the window, hoping to spot whatever was causing the havoc, and something whizzed past over our neighbours’ garden - a woodcock! Now that was a pleasant surprise. So woodcock became number 74 on our ‘birds seen in/from our garden list’ (which doesn’t include various strange things heard flying over at night).
This week I’ve been distracted while working from home by red kites gliding past, including one yesterday (pictured below) which was carrying something around which looked a like a portion of rabbit or maybe squirrel. Red kites have spread all over the UK in recent decades, but only in the past year or so have they become regular garden sightings here.
If you’re doing the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend, you can’t count a red kite unless it actually LANDS in your garden. Sorry.
I’m listening to…
Gruff Rhys’s new album, Sadness Sets Me Free, which includes this track.
I had a red kite sitting in the garden. And a flock of redwing and a greater spotted woodpecker. Obviously last week, I’m doing the birdwatch tomorrow when the birds are asleep. If you have a bath you can get those hosepipe jobbies that over the tap and rinse the screens in the bath. At my old house I had to rinse them off in the garden because we didn’t have a bath and the neighbour claimed it was causing damp in his kitchen because he was batshit.
We had the red kite overhead but not actually landing frustration when doing the birdwatch today 😬