Half term art work factory....

What a treat - half term!
I've forced children to spend hours wrapping pictures in cellophane and then brown paper and sticky tape...so now we celebrate with an outing to the post office.  They don't realise yet, but this is FUN.

Maybe I will let them out at the weekend, as there is a big family bonfire planned and there will even be sparklers...

New prints on Folksy

 Night Dancing

I spent a happy ENTIRE day playing on my computer and making pictures of pictures...
This now means that there are a whole flurry of new lino prints listed in my Folksy shop - huzzah!!

Above are 'Scruffy Bird on a Garden Urn' and 'Nature Guide - British Isles'

I'm sure I've forgotten to do a lino print of a very important animal, so am aiming to do one of everything, but seem to often get stuck on the bird section....oh well....

New lino prints about to hit the shop!!

I've been having a marvellous month of lino cutting and printing and in two weeks time I'll be filling up my Etsy and Folksy shops with the results.  That makes me feel like a proper shop-keeper!

I just want to do a couple more first - really keen to make a lino print of some bladderwrack, because it's such a lovely word, so maybe I'll do that this week.  (and it would surely make a fantastic christmas present??!!!  who wouldn't want a lino print of bladderwrack on their wall???)

Above is one of my faves, 'Feet in Shoes', but you are welcome to have your own fave....

Nest in an oak tree

An oak tree is exactly where I would build my nest if I had the skills to do it and needed somewhere to store a brood of hungry little birdies!

I wonder what's for dinner because they are looking pretty hungry.

Carving oak leaves out of lino is one of my favourite hobbies at the moment, they are creeping into lots of my pictures recently...

Well, lino prints of course...

Happily printing a whole batch of new little lino prints, bursting with creatures and critters and birds and cats in both dresses and wigs...some dancing, some running and some completely still.

I'll let you see them all soon enough, when the ink is dry and the light is right.

(Isn't it great when you can announce to people that you are an actual real life professional vole printer!)

Chippity-chip

My lino cutting fingers are getting blisters - I'm having a phase....just cutting until there is a big pile of printing to be done, and then a whole day filled with wonder and disappointment as things turn out better and worse than expected....

....and then I can lie on the sofa and rest until Christmas (ha!)...while my little elves wrap it all up for me and deliver lino prints to galleries and post office counters...

...I may have spent a little too long communing with the lino blocks recently.

Lino peelings and bits everywhere...

I'm back at it...

The floor feels like a gravel path now, what with walking about barefooted in this tropical June weather.  It would be silly to clear up as it will just happen again.

So far I have cut out about 500 raindrops, some waves, another little Bristol thing and some circles.

I am contemplating a snowstorm, a lemur, three crows standing on the ground and a puffin on a cliff top.  Oh, and I do keep looking at some fabric that seems too plain and could be jazzed up a bit using the medium of lino printing, but maybe I have printed on enough of our house already?  How can you tell when you have reached that point?

Hay on Wye made out of lino

It was that book festival thingy a couple of weeks ago, in Hay on Wye the town of books - I went, it was great and was mostly an ice cream festival as far as I remember, but I did make this little lino print of the town, with the amazing half derelict castle on the hill above...

Little Hay on Wye lino print is right here...

Things I've printed this week....

Only a few days in and already the May print production line has been in full swing!

Getting ready for our Arts Trail in May...

I've started framing a few pictures up to show at our local Arts Trail in South Bristol, which is coming up soon :)

The Southbank Arts Trail has been going for over a decade now, so quite a fixture and also a brilliant sociable affair - as always I have several new prints forming in my mind which I would love to have ready in time, but we will see....

The photo shows my print "Black Cat devouring a City".

The dogs are back!!

I've let some of my dog lino prints loose in my Etsy Shop again!!  They are well house trained, despite appearances I promise :)

...and if you are a dog owner I am sure you recognise the odd bit of dog behaviour here!

Prints and chatter

 Big Cat

farm

Night Flight

I've been fiddling.
Popping lino prints in frames, popularising the use of purple walls as a backdrop to photos, snapping snaps of said prints in frames and purple walls, you know the kind of thing....

The type of thing that can only be done on a sunny Spring morning.

It's a great pottering way to recover from a really busy start to the year :)

I spent a great few days in Wakefield at The Hepworth Gallery  in March - I love this Gallery!!  I even love its lockers, everything is just a yes!  They also had a fab Print Fair, which is obviously exactly my kind of thing and a great chance to chatter away to hundreds of printy folk for days on end.

New Bristol lino print

Work in progress...

A little skyline of Bristol has been emerging this week...
Hopefully a local would recognise a couple of the buildings, but that handy bridge is all you need to make it 'Bristol'!!

Tomorrow will be editioning day - I've stocked up with paper ready - nothing will stop me....

Three new lino prints..

....well, new to you - in my totally driven state of achieving at least 100 hours of solid lino cutting every single week I often forget that I have got a pile of new images that no one else has seen yet...

These have been seen by a few people who dwell in the real world though, and some people who flit around on Twitter will have seen corners and bits of lino blocks, but now they are here too, in blog world for you to see.

Wet Sparrow
Flock & Cat
Lots of Birds in Pyjamas

These are quite big (by my own personal scale of big, which finishes at 45 cm) and if I produce any that are even bigger I will have to start hand delivering them to galleries and customers....


I'm planning to lino cut a puffin looking out at an immense stormy sea for the rest of the month, should keep me mentally occupied for the remainder of February!!

Relaxing printing

After a couple of weeks where any printing I did had to be spot on and perfect it's been great fun to print a whole batch of new cards, where the print has to come out well, but hopefully nobody is going to be using a magnifying glass to check for imperfections!!

A very satisfying pile of cards resulting from  a few hours of work with my roller and my burnishing tool - hurrah.  They are off to a couple of galleries now (and not a heart in sight...)

Leeds Print Festival 2015

Some of my lino prints are heading off to the Leeds Print Festival this week, including this huge flock  of swallows.   They are going to be at the Leeds Gallery, Munro House if you are near by.

It's taken me ages to get them all into their pyjamas, they are such a twittery, flittery lot but finally they are packed and ready to go, wearing a mixture of floral, stripes, pacman and some very trendy triangles.

Really excited to be following along after them, but I'll have to wait until the end of the month as the postman won't take me, and actually my pyjamas are a little shabby in comparison (hmm, should I wear my PJs to the Print Festival so that everyone knows that I belong to my work?  *wanders off pondering....*)

Pigeons and pigeons and pigeons

I did resist the call of lino cutting on Christmas day itself, but managed to tuck in a few little sessions over the last couple of weeks, so now I'm having the fun of a new year printing week!!  Hurray.

What better way to begin a year than by creating your very own giant flock of pigeons?  I really can think of no better one...but that is probably just me.

I know lots of people design clever interlocking blocks in order to print lovely things like wallpaper and curtains, but I'm starting to think that carving one really huge lino block the size of an entire curtain might be a possibility...is that too obsessive?