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or there is no spoon…

It’s all very well to say that a poor workman blames his tools, but the biggest and easiest improvement I made in the printing process was to ditch the cutter and buy a set of gouges – fixed steel blades with wooden bulb handles, sharp enough to cut wood. A knife sharpener, an old leather belt and a blue bar of abrasive compound – apparently known in Scouting circles as smurf poo – are enough to keep them that way.
Paper was easy enough to improve on, too: a roll of Chinese mulberry paper, inexpensive but light and incredibly strong, and a couple of dozen sheets of thick off-white printmaking paper did the trick.
Ink was more difficult. I tried some water-soluble block printing inks, with a strange oozing texture that probably means they are thickened with cornflour or something like that. It did a better job than the first ink I had but not by much. Being thicker, it didn’t bleed into the carved areas as much, but it didn’t transfer well onto the paper and dried too fast on the mixing plate.
Since I already had plenty of acrylic paint, I got some block-printing medium, designed to mix with paint half and half. Again, it kind of worked, but getting the right amount onto the plate was hard to judge: too little and the image was patchy and spare, too much and the print had a strange, spackled surface and lost details. Again, it dried too fast. Eventually I gave in and got some Safewash inks (oil-based but water-cleanable), and they work beautifully, although the prints take a few days to dry.
The single most difficult thing was the press – or lack of one. Even in the days when the advent of digital printing meant that etching presses were being scrapped or given to whoever would take them away, they were a big thing to take on, both in space required and the skills needed to keep them adjusted and maintained. Now they usually cost thousands of pounds. Even small book presses – where a flat plate is lowered from above and tightened down with a screw – take up more space than I have.
Then I saw a fascinating TED talk… just kidding, it was a set of short videos by a printmaker, showing how you could use an inexpensive tabletop machine made for embossing and die-cutting as a substitute for an etching press. You can see the videos here: http://www.outside-line.uk/wp-admin/post.php?post=253&action=edit

He was right, it works very well, at a fraction of the cost and space requirement of a proper press. It limits the size of the prints you can make, obviously (unless you print in sections, A4 is as big as it gets). But it’s easy to use and gives good consistent results, and it’s perfect for printing cards. So the spoon can go out to pasture, or wherever spoons go when they retire…

Pt 1 Back to the middle or don’t put that spoon in the soup!

I’ve made cards at Christmas for years and years, from poster-paint handprint trees on sugar paper to elaborate paper cut-outs. It’s a good thing to do, especially if you are too broke for presents or wanting to divert children from pre-Christmas hysteria. Last year, for the first time since I was in middle school, I decided to do some lino prints.

Those cards started right where I had left off at eight or nine: thin brown lino with a hairy hessian back and toasted organic smell (printing lino is made from a mix of sawdust and linseed oil, heated under pressure). The cutter was a fat teardrop handle of red plastic with some disposable metal blades which slotted into the top. I also bought a plywood bench hook (to avoid gouging holes in fingers or furniture) and some carbon paper – something I also hadn’t seen for a while – to transfer designs onto the lino.

Over a week or two I scraped out a couple of simple designs (a pine tree in snow; a moonlit hare; some mistletoe). The kit came with a small tube of gritty black water-based ink and a roller, and with the high-tech addition of a wooden spoon to apply pressure, I printed out the designs on some card blanks. Although the process was a bit haphazard and several problems became obvious (the ink was very unpredictable, sometime patchy and sometimes leaving great gobs of black obliterating all the detail; applying even pressure was difficult and quickly made my hands ache; lining up the print on the cards was fiddly) most of the cards turned out OK. Some were better than others, for sure, but handmade cards should be a bit shonky, I think.
Having to go through making an image without being able to see it until right at the end turned out to be mildly exciting, like a very low-stakes game of blackjack. The way the whole process broke down into discrete steps that could fit into little slots of available time was useful, as was being able to work indoors without heaving the furniture about. I quite liked the way printing makes you think about design. Plus it’s daft to say you do art and then have to buy cards, surely? So when work decided to pay me a small bonus, I thought I would use it to see what else I could do with printing…

The festival was the last event of the summer, and once it was done and the bags and boxes of art stuff (mostly) crammed back into place, I started the last painting of the year. Trawling through my image bank, photos I took four or five years ago on a Spring visit to the Eden Project caught my eye – some pink and green tulips of a variety called ‘Artist’, I guess because the colours of the flowers are in broken streaks that look like brush strokes.
When the painting was about half done, I went to see an old friend and she had just had a room painted a soft green that went beautifully with the colours I was using. I was trying to get it finished in time for her birthday, and before her next round of treatment started; but as usual it took longer than I expected, and in the end I was bundling it into packing plastic two weeks late, and with the paint only just dry.
The day it arrived she emailed me to say that she loved it, and that it had arrived at just the right time to cheer her up on a particularly low day.
No money changed hands. No reviews were written, no contests won. It’s unlikely that more than a few dozen people will see the picture itself, although maybe a few more will see the hasty photo online. In a couple of years she might redecorate in lilac or something, find it clashes horribly and take it down. But when I called her she told me that she was going to hang it on that fresh green wall where she could see it whenever she came into the room, so that there is a place in her house that is always Spring.
That feels like success to me.

Last year’s festival was wet and windy, and included delights like shambling across a muddy field in the rain to use chemical toilets in the middle of the night, two airbed disasters and the combined refusal from the rest of the family to ever again do tenting.
This year, too hot. Forty-four degrees in the festival tents, the line for the ice cream van twenty deep; the catering crew next door valiantly serving up cooked breakfasts and roast dinners when sweating in a chair was too much like hard work. Good fun, though; and a nice change to be able to go and see some bands in the evenings without a dozen jumpers and some wellies.
That done, followed up by a last-gasp family holiday – it rained, we loved it – crates of art supplied cleaned and cleared away; time at last to actually paint and print. I bought some oil-based printing ink, having avoided it for ages because of the expense and the huge capacity for mess. And both these things still count, but I got small tubes on sale, and it’s beautiful to work with: loads of pigment for good strong colours, great for picking up fine details without flooding or clumping, workable for hours on the slab. Not even that hard to clean up , although I’m not wild about how it smells and you really wouldn’t want to get it in your hair. Overall a big improvement on the water-based inks and mediums I’ve used up to now, although it taking a week to dry will need some thought.
Three paintings to finish too now, before the dark and the damp and time to bring everything back inside.

Been a while. Even the spambots have given up on me, no longer wasting their alluring offers of apps guaranteed to increase site traffic on such an obvious loser.
So much to do, is the thing. New job, because my kids want to go to university and I only have two kidneys. More hours at work, ditto. A thoughtful (handmade\cheap) wedding present that turned out fine in the end but took three solid weeks to do. Preparation for a group show last weekend, and a demo, and then all the clearing and packing away. A bunch of paintings still to do for the August holiday weekend, but now I’ve got a few days to work on them the weather has turned sweltering hot and by lunchtime I have to give up, as the paint bakes solid on the palette and sweat runs down my back.
Since I have such a lot of things to do, I am of course hyper-distractable, very ready to be sidetracked into anything else that comes along – whether it is the implosion of geopolitics or the logistics of moving all the furniture so that a miserable threadbare carpet can finally be replaced.
At work, a bunch of people are leaving or retiring as the end of the financial year approaches, and I wonder what that might be like, to no longer have that particular toad squatting on my life.
Would I finally read through the box of books under the bed, or catalogue the thousands of photographs? Tackle the rampant roses and fix the garden gate? I might just sink down in front of the television and gradually forget to do anything else. Or just take on a hundred more impractical, ramshackle projects in the expectation of all that free time – and then never finish them?