I was a bit slow making Easter cards this year, but finally got around to making some – just in time! I opted for a fritillaria design. The fritillaria image is a linocut print, which I’ve tidied up & added text to in Adobe Illustrator.
Tag Archives: flower
Homemade Floral (and Other!) Brooch Selection
Over Christmas I designed and made a selection of brooches, many of which were designed as presents for family and friends. Pictures of some of the brooches are included below. Quite a few of the brooches were on a floral or natural theme (flowers, leaves), but I also created some other badges too, including a little Olympic Trip camera and umbrella ghost. These are also available from my Etsy shop. Each badge is a printed Shrinky Dink which has been embossed to achieve a nice glossy finish and make the brooch waterproof.
Screen Printing Workshop
Last weekend I attended a two-day screen printing class at Midlands Art Centre. We had a day of learning techniques, followed by a day of making whatever we fancied. In my case, I wanted to make items to sell at the craft fair me and colleagues were organising at work this week (p.s. things went well & we raised £1,717 for charity) so I made six tea towels. I used a stencil design and did two-colour fox and three-colour plant prints:
I also tried a couple of other screen printing techniques. These were direct stencil techniques – where the image is applied directly to the screen rather than creating a separate stencil which is placed over the screen.
The direct application techniques I tried were using charcoal and water soluble crayons. In both cases the image is drawn directly onto the screen and then printed onto fabric using a squeegee to push binder across the screen & print the image. A number of members of our group had a go at direct printing using procion dye, which gave a lovely watercolour-style effect. Unfortunately I didn’t get time to try the procion dye as I was too busy getting my tea towels finished!
I took a few photos of the process of printing using charcoal, which are included below.
I began by printing a simple block of colour as a brackground to my charcoal image:
I then drew an image (of a beetle) directly onto a screen:
And then, once the background colour had dried, I printed the charcoal image:
Direct application techniques using charcoal and water soluble crayons produce monoprints, as it’s only possible to get one true print before the medium begins to fade. You can see below I did a second print of my charcoal beetle drawing and it is much paler than the first print:
Here’s the simple print I did using water soluble crayons:
And another print using a paper stencil:
Sweet Peas Lino Cut Print
Printed Blue Jay
I carved a couple of small images in lino on Thursday evening. I carved them sat on the sofa in the living room while watching TV which probably isn’t ideal! I was a bit more careful when I printed them at least.
The first image is of a blue jay, a bird which is native to North America. Me and Phil are currently more than a little obsessed with the cartoon Regular Show, one of the lead characters in which is a blue jay, which is what inspired me to carve one. Here is my blue jay – a head shot and the full image. Unfortunately I don’t have any blue ink at the moment, so he’s a monochrome blue jay.
My second print was a floral image – the image is roughly based on a detail from a Chinese lacquer box. The first image below is the carved lino matrix used the print the image, and the resulting print is pictured below.
