Recently I've been working on a different way of doing lino - creating a reduction plate which starts as three different jigsaw pieces. It took a while to get my head around it but it was actually really enjoyable slowing down the process and, in particular, hand burnishing everything using a bamboo barren. Below you can see the first shapes with white areas carved out, making up the sea, sky and the cliff/beach area....

...Next you can see that I've cut out the sky to create the far spit of land, carved away the sea to create the shape of the opposite cliff, and I've cut away details from the cliff/beach section so that now they are starting to take shape. At this point 6 layers have been printed - 2 for each section of the 'jigsaw'.

Finally, I cut away the far piece of land to give it a darker, defining layer, then cut away the black cliffs completely so that I mainly had to focus on the grass in the foreground. This I cut with reference to the photograph I was working from, trying to create a simple yet realistic image. My final layer (9) was to cut all of the grass off and simply print the flowers. Lining these up turned out to be quite tricky, especially as I was printing pink on top of quite a dark green. As a result, the pink turned out to be more muted than I was expecting, which is something to take into account for future prints. 

As a last aside I have to admit that there is one glaring mistake with the image as a whole! I always tell my students to make sure they work in reverse when creating images from lino, as everything is reversed when you print it. Alas, I forgot to heed my own advice on this one (I realised about four layers in) ! So this is Sandy Cove, West Cork, in reverse. Ah well - only a few would know!

The altered book project which I'm doing with Katie Nairne and Ella Dickinson has rolled around again and once again I used a combination of illustration and collage to complete my four pages. My favourite page was the illustrated list - something strangely relaxing about just drawing through a list of objects. Perhaps a potential idea for the future? We've talked about rebinding the book as the spine is getting a bit mashed what with all the time spent travelling through the postal service or being squashed by us sticking stuff in. With that in mind I decorated the back cover with typography as a stand in until the time comes for it to be replaced.