My first linocut

Living in Bedford means that Edward Bawden's illustrations are often on display as there is a large collection of his work at the Higgins. A lot of it are lino cuts, so I thought I'd give it a go with my fox character here.

Here is my lino. You carve the lino where you want there to be white space. I got a bit carried away and went through to the back! I patched it up, no problem!

I rolled on some black acrylic printing paint, pressed some paper on top and lifted it off and... It actually looks really cool! I'm so pleased with it!.

Here is the dining room now. Er, I think I got carried away. I started printing on everything! Now to tidy up before my boyfriend gets mad!

Animal Pirates

This is a scanned watercolour painting of some cute pirate animals on a voyage out to sea. It's just some personal development work. I wanted to use my dip pens on watercolour paper and try out the different nibs in the context of an actual illustrations rather than just mark making. I feel a bit sorry for the cat clinging on to the crows nest like that! They should have got themselves a bigger boat!

Illustration Friday: Freeze

This is my original pen sketch.

Above is my drawing scanned and manipulated in Photoshop. 

When thinking about what to draw for Illustration Friday's theme of 'freeze' I initially thought of drawing a frozen landscape, but I've been looking at a lot of photography books. I have a book from Bedford library on Humphrey Spender's humanist landscapes and his photographs are like a freeze frame from history. My illustration is based on a photograph he took in 1939 of a street in Tyneside (North West England). The weather must be pretty cold, the people are wrapped up in furs and their faces reflect the hardships of the economic depression of their time.

 Spender's work appeals to me because it is a historical document.

Now that the majority of people have a phone some do feel the need to broadcast themselves doing the most mundane things. I like the ones that include a lot of environmental context. A simple picture of a busy street will look so interesting in years to come! Our architectural landscape is shaped by the people who use it and in twenty or fifty years time it will be a shame if the only photos that exist of our era are an excess of out-of-focus instagram self portraits!

Hand Embroidery With Cheap Thread.

Some time ago on Ebay I bought a bumper amount of embroidery thread at a low price in various shades and colours and I was pretty chuffed with my purchase... until today! When I washed away the soluble paper after I had stitched the design ( I had spent many hours stitching whilst watching Olympics this week), the bright blue dye on one of the threads bled uncontrollably like a broken fountain pen. It has stained my material. Argh! Two technical blunders in as many projects. Perhaps fate is telling me to give up!

 It doesn't look too bad, I suppose, but it is annoying.

 I like Meagan Ileana's hand embroideries. She uses clean lines with painted watercolour to shade parts of the background. I'm not sure how she stops the paint from getting out of control and bleeding all over the cloth, maybe it's something to experiment with.