Chimney Christmas

While I understand the conventional wisdom that Christmas cards are a postal-service-propping hassle, my good lady Lilly and I do like the annual excuse to put our tiny letterpress through its paces.

Like every year, we try and make the card vaguely thematic to an event from our own past-twelve-months, and this year’s standout event was Lilly showing how excellently she does something when she turns her hand to it – she won the World Bread Award for her home-baked wild-yeast bread this autumn!

Alas, we don’t even have a garden for a wood-fired stove, but Santa’s affinity for chimneys made it a good way to link the season with the achievement. Like one of Lilly’s loaves, the card came out great!

Blue Sunday

Lilly and I got the press back in action today! We printed up a few bits and bobs (Including the Howdy card above, but we only got one ink out, so everything we did is blue!

I finally did some linocut stuff to print! I wrote to Jax a couple of months ago after she made a nice linocut print, asking what the lowdown on linocut was (I was surprised it really was as straightforward as sticking some lino to a block of wood), so I ordered some lino from Hawthorn Printmaker Supplies, along with some other bits and bobs, and the package turned up last week. I spent the day yesterday with power tools, working on some small furniture items for the home, and while I was there, chopped a slab of appropriately thick MDF into chase-sized chunks, as seen in the left picture.

I followed these instructions Jax pointed me in the direction of, and mounted up a few blocks ready to carve. I came up with a simple little fishscale-y pattern to see how it worked, which seemed to go pretty well! It was a lot easier to carve and yielded a lot more even a result than the wood carvings I tried last year. After Lilly printed it up a couple of times, I realised it looked like a big crowd of people sitting in a cinema or something when the other way up:

Hello!

As that went well, I made a nice big Howdy card for us to print, which you should have seen above. Here is my linocut in the press, with some nice off-camera flash action to help bring it out a bit:

We didn’t stop there either! We also printed a tiny greeting using some of the Mixed type I bought off ebay last week, and the bonus elephant block I bought Lilly as a surprise, which came out much cuter than we were anticipating. Cool!

Christmas Cards

570

Happy December, internet folk! After a few weeks of tinkering, begging for supplies, doing test prints, whittling and re-engineering, Lilly and I have finally made our first useable letterpressed product- some christmas cards to send to friends and family!

After the fold, you’ll find pictures of the process and all, so click to Continue reading “Christmas Cards”

An artist called Ricky

So Little Log’s album is on the streets in all formats now and the Hospital hype machine is in full effect. He’s doing interviews here, there and everywhere, including the now not so magazine-like Knowledge Magazine, in its new online format. It was quite nice to see my artwork get a little mention:

The cover alone makes the vinyl edition worth buying with Logistics confessing a love for pop art that has been passed down from his Dad. Hospital commissioned an artist called Ricky to paint a canvas for the cover, with Logistics settling on the album’s title in hope of something reminiscent of the old Batman, comic book-style onomatopoeic speech bubbles.

“It’s a bit more playful which I like. Everything’s so serious these days. I think I might ask for it one day when I’m old and retired. There are a couple of things, like for the first album they made a big LED kind of thing, which I’d still like to get. The two of them together would be quite a nice thing to have. Maybe I’ll have to buy them back!?”

Starts well, I’m glad the writer thinks the cover is worth owning alone, but then Hospital commissioned an artist called Ricky – could that be more vague!?

 
You are currently reading
Page 1