Twisted Pine

 I have neglected my black and white prints for the last year, while I concentrated on larger scale multi colour work (which I plan on posting - sometime!).

But the lure of black and white has brought me back to one of my favourite subjects - pine trees. Available here.

The Mindy Project ...

... is a show on Fox and my Alexandria print will be used in one of the sets in the upcoming season!  This is a first for me!

In Progress .......

In late August I worked on a private commission.  The client purchased five tree images for their holiday card.  I retained the rights to use the blocks in my own prints.  One of the blocks that I cut was not used.  It was replaced with a similar, but wider tree.  I am now printing an edition using these two blocks. Two colours down and two or three to go.  It will be ready for the One of a Kind Show in November.

Blue Horse Running

Another 'cobbled' together print.

The sky is from another reject block. What was I thinking at the time? It is a great block. Good thing I didn't throw it out. I learned that lesson a few years ago when I came across a proof of a print that I thought, at the time, was a lousy image, but years later saw that it was actually quite good. Did I still have the blocks? Nope. Too bad - so sad. I still have the proof though. The colours are a bit wishy washy, but the image definitely had potential. Sigh.

The landform is from a print that never made it through the proofing stage, but by this time I knew better and I saved the blocks and lo and behold this block is actually quite useful. I think I may have to make a few more blocks like this for more variety.

And the horse. Ah, that little horse block has been around for a long time now. When I first cut the block, I didn't have any real use for him. It was only a couple of years later in 1999 that I editioned him up in a print called Running Horse. And now he is continuing to run through all sorts of one-of-a-kind prints.

Along the Cabot Trail

About 18 months I ago I went around the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton and I took all of the usual photos of the ocean and headlands. Typical tourist stuff. But when I was going through them recently I found one of a rock face along the highway. Now I love rocks, but I am rarely satisfied with the way I cut them so I decided to have a go at these with a new set of cutting tools.


The keyblock holding all of the detail is linoleum and the backing blocks are cardboard with added textures, though the textures are pretty subtle. I like the overall effect and the colour combinations. The colours in no way resemble real life, but that's fine with me.

Available for sale here.

Running Horse Plaid

As a bit of a break from working on my large blocks for the quilt prints, I have printed up a number of smaller images based loosely on imaginary fabric patterns. This has also given me the opportunity to play around with transparent inks, which I have rarely done. I find my Daniel Smith transparent base absolutely impossible to work with. I think I should talk to someone at DS about that. My other DS inks are great, so why isn't this one??

So, for the moment, I am trying out Setswell Compound. It makes the ink feel really greasy and it takes ages to dry, but the colours become very transparent. There is also a bit of a problem with ink 'squish' around the edges of the blocks, but who said life was perfect.

The Running Horse Plaid is a pretty jaunty little print. Well, it is not that small - 8"x10"image size - on BFK Rives Lightweight paper. I have all sorts of small blocks, so I sifted through them and came up with the ones I used for this print. OK, I did have to make the long blocks (printed in orange here). There was nothing particularly planned about this print. I just laid down the background yellow and then positioned various blocks on top of it until I had an idea of what I would print next. The colours were actually quite random as well. I had little smidges of ink saved from my quilt proofs and I just used those, watered down immensely with the Setswell.

All in all, not a bad print - to my mind. It makes me think of a sunny kitchen, with this pattern on an old piece of oilcloth on the kitchen table. Part of an imaginary childhood out of a storybook I suppose. But the print is real, so who is to say that that kitchen didn't exist sometime, somewhere.

Printing My Grandmother's Quilts

My father's family comes from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia and my grandmother made quilts for all the beds in the farmhouse. There were winter weight quilts and lighter summer quilts. Many of these old quilts are still left on the farm and when I was there this summer I took pictures and made sketches of 17 or 18 of them with a view to making prints based on their designs.

I started with the quilt my cousin Daniel uses in his spare bedroom. The design is very plain, just a series of stripes, but the overall effect is very calm and pleasing. Most of the darker stipes are made from lightweight woolen fabrics while the very pale stripes are a loosely woven cotton fabric which appears to have been dyed in different colours. The upper photo shows a detail of the proof I pulled of the print. Some of the textural effects worked onto the blocks can be seen in the inking.