I’ve been recently learning about screen printing, which is something I’ve wanted to do for ages. I love the look of screen printed fabrics and prints on paper. My wife bought me a kit and I started off with a couple of prints onto paper which taught me quite a lot about how much of the various screen printing mediums to apply! I particularly wanted to help Lorna with her textile work by designing and printing fabrics which she could use in her work. The idea was this would give her unique printed fabrics and also the ability for us to design exactly the kind of things she wants to use in her work.

So for my third print, I worked with a photo of grasses I’d taken and produced a design in Illustrator (top left, above) which I was very happy with. This is my first print design to use colour to show a background and thus leave a negative space (the fluffy seeds around the grass heads). So I had two colours to print; the brown of the grasses and the blue of the sky. With my screen printing kit I had only screen drawing fluid with which I had to paint on the design and it took ages (a good week). I must get the photo emulsion stuff!

Anyway, with the screens finally finished (the two right hand photos, above) we printed four copies, two of which came out very well and two of which didn’t come out quite so well. We chose some fabrics to complement the print and Lorna worked her magic to turn them into two lovely cushion covers (bottom left in the photo).

It’m very happy with the final result and the cushions are currently available in Lorna’s Etsy shop. I have lots of new ideas for prints, so we’ll see what happens!

Seeing as I’ve mentioned my spare-time stock image creation, I thought you might be interested to see examples of my latest uploads to iStockphoto.

My “sketched earth” globes (top left) have been really popular with their flat paper-like people and objects on the surface of a hand sketched globe with painted sea.

Recently I’ve been really developing my ideas of 3D objects with illustrated graphical elements, as you can see with the microphone, computer network and stethoscope. I think these work well and allow me to really show a concept (like healthy heart) but I want to really push this a lot harder and play with the graphics flowing over the objects.

Eight felt marker brushes I needed for a project. Nobody seems to have created any so I’m posting them here in case they may be useful to anyone else!

These were created from real felt marker lines I drew.

Click to download Felt Marker Brushes for Illustrator