Here are a few recent screen printing pieces that I’ve been making.
His Girl Friday is one of my favourite films of all time, and I’ve been meaning to make a t-shirt or two out of this for some time.
I’m not sure… I’m certain that these photos don’t do the print justice. For starters, the paint I’ve used is slightly reflective, making it hard to photograph. Also, I need to get a lot better at my product photography! There are plenty of YouTube videos for that.
The Instagram version of the above might look a bit better.
This version is even harder to see here, but it looks OK in real life. You can get a better idea perhaps from the original design.
I also made a print to celebrate Geraint Thomas winning the Tour de France recently. Sadly the image doesn’t really work, and I’m not sure that even an cycling enthusiast can tell who it is. The artwork on the computer looks better in my opinion.
Finally, something I’ve been meaning to make for ages. I have an awful lot of books, and I seem to buy them faster than I read them.
In Japan they have a word for this – Tsundoku. I’m always a little dubious about other languages and culture’s words being misappropriated by the English language, but in this instance it appears to be true.
Indeed the BBC recently published a piece on the phenomenon. The piece notes that the word has been used in Japanese since at least 1879, so this isn’t some kind of millennial issue.
I wouldn’t say that I’m a hoarder, but I do seem to be awaiting a vast fortune to come in and allow me to buy a property in which I can properly include my “library.”
It’s also true that podcasts don’t help. Much of my reading is done on my commute, or at least it was until podcasts took over a bit too much. You can only do one or the other. So I’ve been trying to read more on my commute. But I also like to protect my books. I found that I was either re-using bookshops bags quite a lot – particularly if they were more robust. Or I was actually using a small canvas bag that I bought specifically to hold books. I’m one of those annoying people who take the dust jackets off books I’m reading to “protect them.” (I realise that dust jackets are actually supposed to protect books themselves, but I find I just end up with a messed up dust jacket).
Anyway, that’s all a long way around of why I made these.
I like the design although despite printing a few of them, none is perfect. The bags I’m using have a very thin canvas layer that soaks up the paint a little too well. You absolutely have to have a piece of paper or card inside when you’re printing these, and you can see that none of these three examples is perfect. There are another three imperfect ones I’m not showing you. I’m not quite ready to open an Etsy shop selling these!
Fortunately canvas bags are cheap, so these mistakes aren’t expensive.
And yes, that pile of books is based on an actual photo of a very small proportion of my unread books. I really ought to stop writing here, and get back to reading…
My portfolio of screenprints and related ephemera is on Flickr.
