The third in a series of four bird prints which I've been working on for a while - one for every season. This one flummoxed me for a while as it was a complicated second plate for the top layer, but we got there in the end! Nice to get it done before I go on Maternity leave - maybe I'll even manage the Summer print too...

For the last few years I've been working on a top-secret project which I can now reveal is a calendar/book about pregnancy which was published last month by CICO books! Entitled, 'A Bun in the Oven' it takes you through pregnancy week by week and compares your foetus to different objects so that you can visualise the size, whilst giving you some handy tips along the way. You can buy your copy here. 

AWESOME night last night watching The Lone Bellow play the Brudenell in Leeds. SWEEEEEEET sounding as ever! Got to make the gig poster too which was lots of fun. It's a two colour screenprint featuring every venue they'll be playing at on their European Tour this month. GET TICKETS!

More monoprint collages to celebrate little people! And one for a big person.

Suddenly it feels like Autumn is creeping up on us too soon! Take me back to Turkey!

If you're wondering why I've been so slack at posting lately, it's because I'm carving a BEAST of a linocut at the moment. It is of all the shells I could find in my house. Turns out there are A LOT. 

Last week I spotted a beautiful dead rat on the verge while I was out for a run. He truly was the most beautiful dead rat I've ever seen. Well worth a sketch. 

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.