New work in progress – with hand carved text!

Finally I have time to start a new print. I got this goat willow (or pussy willow) in a bunch of flowers a few weeks ago and I couldn’t resist drawing it…in my beautiful new sketchbook. I bought this lovely handmade book from Richard Shimmel, a fellow lino artist, who has used some of his extra prints to cover these books. They are beautifully made and a joy to use.

I wanted to do something that would look like a bookplate from an old botanical book. I had an idea about the kind of typeface I wanted so searched the internet and found this one. It’s called Matador and it’s just what I had in mind.

Here is the start of the tracing process. For a change this is going to be a multi block print, which is a bit out of my comfort zone as I really do prefer to do reduction prints! Once I’ve carved this key block I will offset it onto the other blocks to make sure everything is in the same place.