Hot off the press

Just received delivery of a stash of flat printed sheets to be made up into new books. Ten White Beasts and Ten White Blooms. Thanks to printed.com again for doing an excellent job!

Ten orange cracker books

Flocked and finished - hurray!

Cracker books are go

Final stages of the edition of ten cracker books… all the components are ready for assembly - just need to start sticking.

Working it out

Initial pencil crayon sketches to work out colour overlays for a new illustrated book - Ten White Blooms (final part of the trilogy to accompany Beasts and Birds).

Petal Prints

6-page concertina book of digital prints of rubber stamped flowers on 250gsm gesso paper. Hand stamped patterned endpapers, fluorescent pink board covers with a floral die-stamped title band.

Available to buy now in the shop...

Production line

Lots of cutting and sticking to make an edition of a new book – Petal Prints. 

Photos of the finished book to follow tomorrow…

Pull the other one

Prototype cracker book… part of a collaborative project with the Artists’ Book Club (ABC) at the University of the West of England - inspired by Rebecca Weeks’ magnificent collection of cracker toys.

The cover is grey board with painted edges, and covered in orange flock paper (30p a metre from the wonderful Scrappies in Church Stretton). Decorated with red rubber stamped stripes, neon acrylic paint dots and neon pink paper. Inner pages are digitally printed scans of back-drawn monoprints on 300gsm gesso paper (from printed.com). These are then hand printed with rubber stamps using Tsukineko Radiant Neon ink pads. This will eventually be a small edition, presented with a collection of other cracker books. Don’t seem to be shaking off the obsession with neon colour any time soon.

One white beast

Working on a companion book to ‘Ten White Birds’… ‘Ten White Beasts’. 

Forest

The first set of 'Forest' double concertina books have sold like hot cakes, so I've made up a new batch. Available now in the shop...

Forest

Trial and error with stencils and stamps

Small-scale mock-up to work out pagination when setting up the artwork 

A re-working of a one-off book of rubber stamp stencil illustrations I made a couple of years ago. I deconstructed the original book and scanned each page before enlarging the layout and getting it digitally printed as flat A2 sheets (by the excellent printed.com). I created new stamp-stencil artwork for the title bellyband. The format is a double concertina, which took a bit of head scratching to get the pagination correct. But it’s a very pleasing, solid structure once assembled. Scalpel at the ready to cut down and make up the first ten...

Leaf Labels

Leaves printed in yellow and blue neon ink, labels printed in midnight blue

Work in progress

Endpapers printed with photopolymer stamp made from a hand drawn leaf pattern

Five finished copies 

A new book – cataloguing of the names of different leaf shapes. I used the rubber stamps I carved for my first book ‘Autumn Leaves – A Pocket Guide’ but printed them with my new neon inks. Printing the blue on top of the yellow makes a good bold green, with the added bonus of extra colours when slightly mis-registered. The colour prints well on the heavy Somerset velvet paper. The labels are photopolymer stamps I made, and printed in midnight blue. Endpapers are also a photopolymer stamp I created from hand drawn leaf pattern. The neon yellow ink prints really well on bright blue paper… makes your eyes jump. Cloth covered boards for the cover with a book cloth label and pamphlet stitching. To be added to the shop very soon...