It's that time of year again

I don't do much commissioned work, or work to order. Being happy to work wherever the muse takes me. One regular piece of work that I do produce though is the cover design for the annual report of the Huddersfield Birdwatchers Club. Having recently celebrated it's 50th year the Club has published an annual report every year. Since 1989 I have been providing the cover designs so the report to be published this year will be my 30th consecutive cover. Initially the designs were black and white Pen and Ink drawings on scraperboard. With the dawn of the digital age it became cost effective to introduce colour and with the 2008 report I began to produce  full colour linocuts for the cover designs.
I try to make the designs decorative, choosing as a subject a species that I think will make an interesting and attractive print rather than some locally recorded rarity. I leave it to the photographers in the club to provide illustrations of such species. I also try not to repeat myself, with the species list currently standing at 274 I've still got a good few to go at yet.

My usual starting point is to browse through my sketchbooks hoping that some drawing will "leap out" at me as a promising design. In this case it was a sketch of a male Reed Bunting drawn on 26th August 1993.

Working from the sketch I began with a couple of thumbnail drawings to work out a composition then copied the original sketch at the size I wanted it for the print (top left). In my original drawing the bird had a Crane Fly in its beak. My intention was to reproduce this in the print but then I decided that against the background it would look too fussy and get lost. So in my second drawing I dropped the fly and just had the bird singing. The next step was to produce a full size cartoon to work out the design and colour separations before tracing it on to the lino and printing the first colour. The plan at this stage is to print the design in 6 colours - possibly 7.

Colour 1

Colour 2

Exhibition News

I am very pleased to have had three prints accepted for exhibition at the V International Mezzotint Festival to be held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ekaterinburg, Russia. The exhibition starts on 16th August and runs until October. The accepted prints are shown below:

Blencathra from Castlerigg Stone Circle

 High Force - Teesdale

Ingleborough

New work and an update on events this year.

After what seems like an age since I last finished a print,  finally I have some new work completed. A bit of a departure from my usual style in that this started life as a single colour linocut which I wasn't too happy with. So I hand coloured it with watercolour.

Peregrine

Hand coloured Linocut

260mm x 145mm

Varied edition of 40 

Printed on 220gsm Fabriano Rosapina

I've had a few Art Fair confirmations over the last couple of weeks. First up this coming weekend on 30th March, I'll be at Armley Printfest, a new event being held at Armley Mills in Leeds. So for a change fairly local for me. On 25th - 27th May I will be at Saltaire Makers Fair in Victoria Hall, Saltaire. Then in July on 20th -21st it's up to Art in the Pen at Thirsk Auction Mart followed on 10th - 11th August by Skipton Art in the Pen.

Mezzotint Workshop - Day 2

The results from this weekends' Mezzotint workshop. The group of printmakers taking part whilst admittedly all were experienced etchers none had done a mezzotint before. These prints were all produced during the course of two 6 hour sessions. For first attempts and considering the limited time spent on them I think this is a seriously impressive body of work.

Mezzotint Workshop - Day 1

This weekend is something of an experiment. Whilst exhibiting at various print fairs I've had a few enquiries about doing mezzotint workshops. I've succesfully done linocut workshops over two days but I wasn't sure it would be possible to do a mezzotint print over a weekend workshop. So to test the idea I prepared a handful of small plates and set off over the hills to my friend Alan Birchs' Prospect Studios and a group of printmakers willing to give anything a go. My idea was to spend the first day  getting the image on the plate and then print them up and refine them on the second day. However, by mid afternoon today some plates were at such a stage as it was worthwhile printing impression to check progress.

Tomorrow we'll have plenty of time to further refine the images on the plates.

High Force - Teesdale

Finally finished editioning the High Force print.

High Force-Teesdale

Mezzotint

Edition of 20

200mm x 150mm

Printed in Indigo Ink from Hawthorn Printmakers Supplies on Fabriano Rosapina paper.

An unusual view of the waterfall, normally the fall is shown from a viewpoint a little further down the river which shows the full width of the waterfall to it's best effect. However, my viewpoint was chosen by the weather. On the day I went there was a heavy drizzle which soaked everything through within minutes and the only viewpoint offering any sort of dry shelter from which to make my sketch was close under the right hand side of the cliff beneath a small overhang. Not ideal as from this viewpoint the vast bulk of the fall is hidden behind the right hand cliff.

Editioning

Finally finished the platework and this afternoon I started to pull the first impressions. I managed to get 7 printed before tea.