STOP

Let the cat out of the (plastic) bag please!

Two (letterpress) days out

The Whittington Press Open Day, September 7th.
Presstival 2013 poster featuring very large Caslon ligature.

Tilley Printing in Ledbury, Open Day visit on September 10th.
Lots to make me smile!

This land is your land

The title of a folk song written by Woody Guthrie in 1944. It speaks to us in Stroud at the moment where 2 housing development plans are working their way through the planning process.
Letterpress comment here: the rights of the land owner on one side, balanced against the public right of way on the other. Our local valley landscape of fields, woods and footpaths is a precious part of our lives.
The small woodcut to the right of the word "is" is by father. He cut his initials the wrong way round, so they have printed backwards. Schoolboy error, dad?!

100 talismanic forms of the character Shou, representing long life

100 characters as published in a 1975 Thames and Hudson book on Taoist diagrams and calligraphy which themselves derive from The Religious System of China written by Jan Jakob Maria de Groot (1854-1921). Each character is beautifully balanced and harmonious, moving in and out of symmetry with a satisfying rhythm.


For this silkscreen, I traced the characters on to mark resist film and had to change pens as I went, when the original ran out of ink and then finding a similar drawing line was difficult. The unplanned change in line quality adds more variety to the set, I hope.

Gentle gentrification

As a member of Walking the Land, the first Friday of every month takes me on a drawing walk in the Stroud area. This print (vinyl cut with wooden and metal letterpress) is the result of a walk in Edge, a village near Painswick, and a discussion about land ownership and the extensive renovation of old farms in the area. There was no upper case P in the metal Bodoni typeface I chose for the phrase locating the hamlet of Paradise, but I realised that without it, the phrase becomes a relevant twist on the expression the grass is greener. This print is currently part of an exhibition at The Old Passage restaurant at Arlingham, on the banks of the river Severn.

Doublets word game

Doublets is a word game invented by Lewis Carroll. The rules were published in Vanity Fair Magazine in 1879:

The rules of the Puzzle are simple enough. Two words are proposed, of the same length; and the Puzzle consists in linking these together by interposing other words, each of which shall differ from the next word in one letter only. That is to say, one letter may be changed in one of the given words, then one letter in the word so obtained, and so on, till we arrive at the other given word.

I love the poetic flow this game creates, and have been using it in my current work.
The overprinted version is a photoshop experiment. I will try the real thing on press, using colour overprinting.

Going round in circles

A latin palindrome describing the behaviour of moths: in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni which translates as: we go wandering (in circles) at night and are consumed by fire.

I want to print letterpress in circles. The print shown here is a rough hand-printed version from loose metal type. I now have a type high (23.3mm) metal circle template to build up to the correct circumference (or do I mean diameter?) for setting on the press bed with flexible thin leading. Just not sure how I will fix the letter spacing as it moves round the circle. Work in progress...