Shiny New Christmas Cards

Despite spending so much time on buses, trams and trains lately, traveling to various parts of the country to deliver framed prints for different exhibitions, I've managed to get a new card design finished and screen printed just in time for Christmas. Hopefully the cards will make it to a few of my favorite shops, galleries and craft fairs. I'm not sure if the colours are particularly festive but I wanted to try something different and also use the metallic purple acrylic which has been at the bottom of my box of screen printing supplies for a long long time. The metallic ink shows up well on the eco natural cards but I really like it on the brown kraft cards. This time I used A6 recycled card blanks and envelopes from 'Docrafts' which are about £5 for 50 so seem like good value for money. The brown kraft card blanks are from Fred Aldous in Manchester, it's a great art shop and definitely worth a visit.

Folk Tree Window Installation

Ok, so I might have gone a little bit overboard with the Folk Trees but I really enjoyed creating this installation and little exhibition of my work for The Red Door Gallery. Admittedly it did involve a lot of late nights spent folding, glueing and cutting out little card trees. And the vinyls were a nightmare to install but no pain no gain as they say. It was a great opportunity to be able to finally show the whole series of Folk Tree screen prints together.

New Cards for Autumn

With alot of overtime in the print-room I managed to get a batch of new cards screen printed and ready for autumn as well as to take to Scotland for my little exhibition at The Red Door Gallery. As with all my cards I used recycled card but at the moment I particularly like eco natural and brown kraft. They really do look recycled which is probably down to the colour and also the tiny flecks of other materials that show up on the card. The brown kraft is a little textured but as long as my ink isn't too thick and I flood the screen properly it's easy to get a fairly good print quality. Sometimes I use card blanks but lately I've been printing onto A4 card then folding and cutting the cards by hand, it's not as bad as it sounds but after a long day of printing it can be a bit tedious.

Folk Tree Tote Bags

At last I've managed to progress from screen printing one colour tote bags to two colour tote bags and even managed to do it without making a huge pile of rejects. I printed these Folk Tree tote bags especially for a small exhibition and window installation I was invited to do at The Red Door Gallery in Scotland. I've also been busy screen printing more one colour Folk Tree tote bags. It's so much easier now I've found the right screen for my work, a 62 mesh count is perfect for printing my designs onto fabric.

Mythical Creatures Postcard Book

As well as trying to juggle drawing, printing, exhibiting and a bit of teaching during summer I also spent alot of time putting together Mythical Creatures, the new Girls Who Draw postcard book. In theory it should be easier, quicker and cheaper to get a whole book done by collaborating with other people instead of creating it alone. Unfortunately things don't seem to work that way when there are 12 different illustrators involved, who have different levels of experience and who live in different parts of the UK. I lost count of the number of emails which I wrote and sent out, the number of emails which I recieved, read and replied to as well as phonecalls, text messages and smoke signals. Then there were the late nights spent downloading other people's artwork, followed by downloading last minute amended versions of other people's artwork, swearing, getting work re-sent because it was RGB instead of CMYK, getting files re-sent because they were corrupt, accidentally re-sizing artwork into metres instead of centimetres and swearing a whole lot more. And don't get me started on renaming other people's files because that's the one of the worst jobs. Exactly what am I supposed to do with 24 files all named Mythical Creatures?

Was it worth the effort? Yes, or at least I think so mainly because I got to work with a few of my favorite illustrators. One of them is definitely Kristyna Baczynski and she designed the beautiful cover for Mythical Creatures as well as contributing two amazing postcard designs. Then there's Esther McManus and Mina Braun who are also both screen printers. I've started adding information about them and the others involved in the postcard book to mythicalcreaturesbook.blogspot.com

Just to prove I can actually draw something other than Folk Trees here is one of my postcard designs, Pair of Sirins, which was inspired by Russian folk prints. This is the finished version which unfortunately didn't actually end up in the postcard book because in the chaos of trying to get everything to print on time I didn't notice the wrong design had been used until it was too late. Oh well, "C'est la vie" as they say, or better still "merde alors", that's more like it.

More Folk Trees

I'm still drawing Folk Trees which is worrying as it's been well over a year since I started and there are no signs of this obsession ending anytime soon. I've also noticed a few flowers creeping into my work and I think there may be more to come, I guess it was only a matter of time. These are two new designs from summer, Folk Tree and Flowers and Flower Tree.

Occasionally I get asked how I create my designs as they are quite neat, sometimes people think they are done digitally which seems strange because to me they are always a bit wonky. The originals tend to look like these two, A4 black and white artwork drawn on bristol board with 0.2 or 0.3 fine line pens. It's very time consuming, slightly obsessive and probably a bit old fashioned for most. If I'm lucky the originals won't need too much work and with a bit of nip and tuck from photoshop they are soon ready to screen print. I'm getting quite adept at drawing everything for a two colour design all on one sheet of paper and by making sure different parts don't touch it's alot easier to separate the artwork for each colour using photoshop.

Little Books for Little People

Unfortunately I don't have enough time to work on my own books at the moment. Over summer I decided to update the artwork for my Birthday Book and Lonely Panda's Very Little Colouring Book and get both books reprinted by the nice people at Tuckey Print in Birmingham. The original copies were litho printed but the new ones have been digitally printed and both have 16 pages of fun including the cover. These little books come with either mini felt pens or mini colouring pencils.