Art, Paper, Prints and Painting

I love paper. Ever since I started printing I love the feel and texture of paper. There are so many varieties of paper. Hands made, machine made, papers for different purposes, art, printing, tracing, watercolour etc etc. I love pepper with a texture. So many papers have a texture. Sometimes you won’t realise it until you touch it.   I have a lot of respect for paper. It is a natural material. Mostly made from wood pulp, but also from linen, cotton, grasses and so forth. I don’t like to waste paper. I keep scraps and use them for lists, for collage, just not throw paper away even if it’s   going to be recycled.   I started making boxes and books to go in the boxes. I used to buy beautiful sheets of decorative paper to cover the books and the boxes.   I still make books and I cover them in my own prints.   I also have a stock of screen prints that were not good enough to sell. (No waste please!) So I started cutting the unwanted printed paper up to make books and...

AI is making it easier than ever to create unique, eye-catching pictures. With tools like MidJourney , you can type in a simple prompt—“a neon city floating in the clouds” or “a cat dressed as a pirate”—and get back detailed, professional-looking images in seconds. You don’t need drawing skills or expensive software, just your imagination and a few words are enough to spark incredible results.  The fun lies in experimenting, seeing unexpected outcomes, and letting AI help you capture ideas you might never have been able to sketch by hand. But the magic doesn’t have to stop with a still image. MidJourney now lets you animate those creations directly into short video clips. With a single click on the Animate button, your static picture can turn into a living scene—a camera slowly panning through your neon city, or your pirate cat swaying as if caught by the wind. You can keep it subtle with gentle motion or go bold with dramatic shifts, creating clips up to 21 seconds long. In just ...

  I am not completely convinced that a web page will be worth the time and effort not to mention the cost! No matter what they say about AI making a web page for you in 20 seconds, it's  just not true.  Yes, it will generate a web page but it's  not actually any good as it still needs you to input your information, your thoughts, your style, influences, techniques and all the photos of your work. That, my dear readers is what takes time, effort and money. Yes, money. As a web page is not at all free. Even if you spend hours & hours creating a page with the help of AI, you still have to buy your domain, pay for hosting, pay for extras, so it is not free at all. After that you have to spend hours posting your work on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, linkedin and any other social media that you can think of.  It doesn't mean you will sell anything either. In fact your ideas and style can easily be copied. And it's  very difficult to control and police your wo...

Next phase after putting the chapters together is binding the sections, glueing, and attaching the boards. I covered the boards with lovely blue paper and am ready to attach the book block to the boards. I use extra strong vinyl glue to be sure all will hold together and the advantage with this type of glue is that is it dries quickly and I can wash the brush with water. I'm really pleased with the finished book. There are nine in the limited edition, so it's a bit special. I will make some others which will be slightly different, so a separate edition.

Here is my recent work a combination of screen printed pages and handmade book. I started with working out the size I wanted for the book, number of pages and so forth. Then as I wanted to make a notebook for people to write their own text, memos etc but I still wanted to print images to decorate the inside. I settled on printing small trees which would be along the edge of the pages and not take up too much space and every two pages would be blank. Printed and ready to bind I really enjoy bookbinding. It takes a long time and lots of measurements but it's a satisfying process. I love the feel of paper and enjoy sourcing new decorative papers. The paper has to be both light weight but fairly strong, not to rigid but not too stiff either. Wallpaper for example just wont do. So japanese papers are probably a bit light even though they are beautiful. Come back in a few days and see how I'm getting on, see the finished book! Have you any advice, tips or tricks? I...