This week I started teaching a six week lino printing course for beginners for a community wellbeing project in Durham. We started off by learning all about the tools and materials that we use, and then worked on carving a simple floral lino print. We then printed this up, again, I gave plenty of hints…
I spent a lovely afternoon today leading a crafting wellbeing session, teaching everyone how to make these crepe paper roses. The session was for a local school group, and was to help the staff unwind and learn something new. Aren’t their flowers gorgeous? If you would like to have a go at making these crepe…
Over the summer in my community craft group at The Lodge in Blackhill and Consett Park, we have been making raffia baskets. Here are a few of the baskets, both in progress and finished. I love how they have all turned out – amazing work, everyone! The trickiest part of raffia basket weaving is getting…
With the Lindisfarne Gospels coming to the Laing Art Gallery this autumn, interest has been growing in the art of creating Celtic knots. One of my two main art focuses is drawing Celtic knotwork, and I teach this skill to others too. In the class I’ll teach you how to draw a basic Celtic knot….
What a great three weeks I’ve had lino printing with the community art group at The Lodge at Blackhill and Consett park! We have been working with one of my rose sketches, and from this, created reduction lino prints, gradient prints, two colour lino prints using using one block and masking, as well as plain…
Pictured is the beginning of one of my Celtic knotwork drawings. They start from a pencil drawing, often involving a geometric base. Once hand drawn, the piece is coloured in pencil, with a little bit of gold ink along the way sometimes. With all the intricate detail and many layers of colour, an A4 piece…
If you’ve been following me for a while, then you’ll know that I always like to take part in the Twitter Art Exhibit each year. The project was originally set up 12 years ago by artist David Sandum, to raise money to buy children’s books for a library in Norway. Since then the project has…
A lovely bunch of crepe paper roses was created by my students at my weekly community art and craft class. These roses were all made out of professional florist quality crepe paper, which meant that they were easy to mould, and kept their shape. I love that each student put their own interpretation on their…
My third colouring colouring book is out now! This book is my second Celtic knotwork colouring book, and is a reflection of the Celtic knotwork that I have been creating over the past three years. The video above takes you through a few pages of the book, there are 52 pages in total, so plenty…
These hand bound books were created over two workshop sessions. The first session was spent creating abstract acrylic paintings, using a wonderful and slightly addictive technique that plays to the properties of acrylic paint, and involved creating many layers. In the bottom row, middle photo, you’ll see some of the papers I have created with…
The video above will take you through a very quick sneak peek of my next colouring book. This book has been three years in the making, and contains much of my hand drawn Celtic knotwork that I have created over those years. The book will be released on 27 May 2022, but if you would…
My history with lino printing goes back to the early 1990s, when I bought a ‘Make your own rubber stamp’ kit at Make Your Mark in York. Back then I used to make small lino cuts to decorate my envelopes with (I was a huge letter writer and mail artist back then), but I soon…
