The Ever-Lasting Meat ‘n’ Potato Pie

The Ever-Lasting Meat 'n' Potato Pie

A one-off relief print for my uncle’s 60th birthday. He loves a meat ‘n’ potato pie, but the good ones are hard to come by down south, so I made him an ever-lasting one instead. This blockprint won’t ever be repeated, so I won’t be selling this print – even though I was asked to whilst I was at his party this weekend!

Hand-carved blockprint using PZKut, printed with Daler Rowney ink on Japanese simili paper.

When I got back home I was thrilled to see my Footprints artwork had been included in the DudeCraft round-up. I love the DudeCraft blog, the posts send you to many fascinating artists – you can get lost for hours following them all.

This next bit is really for the people who know me personally – so they can see how brave I was this weekend! My parents, hubby and I visited Duxford Imperial War Museum, and although I am not happy bunny around planes, I got to achieve one ambition – to go on Concorde – being the “Contrary Mary” I am, I did always fancy flying on one of these! Yes, here I am stood in the doorway, about to go in (Apologies for the bad photos – the camera on my phone doesn’t do well in low light.)

Mind, I do look a bit apprehensive in that photo, don’t I?!

It was a really interesting day, and I also got to see close-up two of the planes that my dad helped to design, and he could explain exactly which areas of each plane he designed. They were the Tornado:

and the Jaguar:

I used to have a poster of the Jaguar up on my bedroom wall, being so proud of my dad! It’s strange that I should be so reluctant to get on a plane though, isn’t it? A fascinating day, and well worth a visit if you’re in the area.

I’ll be back soon with more news on the collaborative journal project and where you will be able to see our work – we’re just in the planning stages at the moment

a rare sight

A tidy studio…
I’m just posting this for posterity, as it won’t look like this again (See me + the studio for how it normally looks .)
Yes, spring cleaning fever has hit me already. So far I must have thrown out about 100 pens that don’t work anymore (yes, I have hoarded them up until now) and various bits and pieces that I’ve kept for some reason or another and were really just rubbish. There’s still plenty more to tidy – the shelves come next!

Footprints – 7

I carved the final blockprint in the Footprints series today, and am pleased, yet saddened at the same time, as I really enjoyed carving this series. If you haven’t seen it already, check out Footprints – 7 – in progress where I posted up a short video of me carving a few bits of the final print.

A few photos of the final carving during the carving process:

The final print with the carving block:

The final print:

Footprints - 7

Hand carved relief blockprint using PZKut, printed with Daler Rowney Water Soluable Block Printing Ink on Japanese Simili Paper. Carved on 23rd January 2010. Final carving in a series of seven carvings based on the feet of the Terris Novalis sculpture in Consett (see this post).

And here are all seven prints together with their carved blocks:

Footprints – 7 – in progress

Footprints – 7 – in progress, originally uploaded by eraser carver.

Last one of the Footprints series underway.

Unintentional background music by Marillion, album Fugazi, track “She Chameleon”. I like my music on loud when I work – good job we have no neighbours

Footprints – 6

If you saw my earlier post today you will have seen that I have spent most of the day working on Footprints 6. Footprints 5 was an easy carve, but as you will see, this one took a bit longer. I have really enjoyed carving these feet, and it will be a shame when I carve the last one. Although I am thinking I might have to carve an image of the whole sculpture to tie everything together… not sure about that yet though.

Here’s the carved block in front of the print:

And the finished print by itself:

Footprints - 6

Hand carved relief blockprint using PZKut, printed with Daler Rowney Water Soluble Block Printing Ink on Japanese Simili Paper. Carved on 18 January 2010. Number six in a series of carvings based on the feet of the Terris Novalis sculpture in Consett.

Stay tuned for the last footprint…

Carving in progress

This is actually a test more than anything else – apparently I can post via e-mail, so I am testing it out and seeing if I can send pictures too!

The pictures are of Footprints 6, which I am in the process of carving today.

If this email post works, then expect more blogging via my mobile phone in the future

foot6a

foot6b

Good Mail Day

It was a “good mail day” in several ways on Tuesday – our post finally arrived for the first time since before Christmas! Amongst the post were several postcards and decorated envelopes from artist friends, and the book and replacement Polaroid film I had ordered arrived Of course, I was out at work when they came, but that made the surprise all the better to find them all behind the front door when I got home

The book I ordered just happened to be called Good Mail Day by Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler, and is an absolute delight.

I have mentioned in a previous post how much I have enjoyed mail art over the years, and this is an inspiring book. It takes you through the history of mail art, tips and techniques for posting items and keeping the post office on your side, tips on creating a portable mail art kit, sources for mail art inspiration, decorating and creating envelopes, faux postage, the art of letter writing and how to set up your own mail art project. I have really enjoyed reading this book over the past two evenings. Some of the ideas made me smile in reminiscence, as my husband used to send me the craziest things through the post when we used to live in different cities (and even countries at one point) and no matter what he sent or what shape it was, it always got through! I remember he sent a matchbox through once, and the box wasn’t much bigger than the stamp so the address was *tiny* – still reached me intact though! Although, no-one has ever beaten the plastic orange coffin I got sent through the post once (posted as is – i.e. without an envelope) and which contained a couple of small plastic skeletons, plastic spiders and Hallowe’en sweets. In fact – I still have it – one moment please, dear reader, and I shall take some photos and be right back!

Here it is: received probably about 8 years ago, and made by Wrenay K. Sorry about the poor picture quality, but it’s dark, and I didn’t want to use the flash:

Wouldn’t you just love to get fun stuff like this through the post? The mantra in “Good Mail Day” is to receive post, send post, and they are so right about that.

I have just joined up to another round of the Carving Consortium’s “Carve Mensis” project, whereby a group of artists send carved art through the mail to each other every month, for four months. I love this project and have taken part many times over the years. I’ll be working on my art for the current round this weekend.

Welcome, Jill, to the collaborative journal project too! That’s 5 of us signed up now If anyone else would like to join (mentioned in this post), please let me know soon, as I’ll be finalising details very soon.

Now, let’s send some mail art and brighten up someone’s letter box!

a few journals

I’ve been messing around with creating art journals lately, so I thought I would share a few pictures of them today.

I was asked to show a few pages from my recent 11 o’clock shot journal, which was a project I set for myself to take a picture of whatever I was doing at 11am every day, and journal about it. As I take a lot of pictures with my mobile phone, I would also add in pictures from the rest of the day, as well as other bits and pieces I’d picked up during the day. Although the project is finished for the moment (I just keep going until I fill up a book and then have a rest until the previous one is finished), I haven’t finished all the pages yet, so these aren’t all in their finished state. For the journal itself I used an old diary of the year 2000 – I picked up about 10 of them in 2001 in a stationery shop for about 10p each – thinking “they’ll come in handy some day…”

A few random spreads, both finished and unfinished:

Over the holidays I’ve been watching Teesha Moore’s videos on YouTube, and this following journal is her Amazing 16 Page Journal. I have followed Teesha and Tracy Moore for many years, as they always featured prominently in RubberStampMadness and I love their work. I was really taken by Teesha’s relaxed attitude to her journal making in the videos, do take the time to watch them if you haven’t already.

This is the journal all painted up and ready to go – you will see that I love my bright colours – can’t be doing with pastels or sepias!

And this is what I’ve been doing with the first spread – nothing on the blue page is stuck down yet, so it might change. (The snowman and the cut-outs with it are a card I was sent by Innocent Drinks!)

Plenty of more work to do on that yet.

After watching Teesha Moore’s video I also took a 12×12 piece of double-sided scrapbook paper and used the same method to create a journal from that one sheet, which I think came out nicely, it’s a handy little size at 4×6 inches:

Thanks to Lesley, Kathleen and Lynn who all said they would like to work on a collaborative journal project – we’ll get it sorted next time I see you all!

Keep warm!

Footprints – 5

This footprint was a quick carve yesterday, really didn’t take long at all. I know what is to come for the next two footprints though, so they might take a while longer!

Here’s the foot as it was being carved:

And this is the actual carving block in front of the print:

The final print:

Footprints - 5

We *still* haven’t received any post Makes the anticipation of the book I’ve ordered and a fresh new set of Polaroid film all the better, I suppose!

Back soon with some journalling stuff…

Footprints – 4

Yesterday I carved number four in the series of carvings based on the feet of the Terris Novalis sculpture (see this post). For some reason this was the one I wasn’t looking forward to, as the foot on the sculpture didn’t have much in the way of detail. So I decided to do a bit of freeform carving in order to create some fur, and see how it turned out:

Once I’d finished the initial fur carving, I ran a black inkpad over the image to get a clearer idea of how it was coming along:

I decided to go in and carve out a bit more detail, and was pretty happy with the end result. Here’s the carving itself in front of the final print:

And the final print in detail:

Footprints - 4

Hoping to get on to Footprint 5 today