Giant Mono Printing

Working with paper stencils, cheap waterbased relief printing inks this giant monoprint was created. 

Cafe Royal 'Rubber Stamps' by Stephen Fowler

My Rubber Stamps book for Cafe Royal came out in the Summer. I'm over the moon with it.
Thanks to Craig Atkinson, the fantastic publisher and photographer.

Rubber Stamps
11cm x 8cm x 1.5cm
Hand made tray with lift off lid, both 1500 micron card.
Coated with Amethyst Wibalin Buckram
Foil blocked in flat black

edition of 50

Contents:
32pp zine, b/w digital
a selection of hand made prints and badges

each box contains different prints and badges. Some contain more of one and fewer of the other. Max two badges, min one badge.

The stamp impressions are all from the Minnesota Centre for Book Arts Scott Helmes and Picasso Gaglione Stamp Archive.

You can buy the book here.

The S.Helmes & W.Gaglione Stamp Archive is one of the largest repositories of rubber stamps and stamp-related materials in the world. Comprised of hundreds of commercial and one-of-a-kind boxed sets and over 70,000 individual stamps spanning a period of 120 years, the H/G Archive is both comprehensive and incredibly diverse. In addition to physical stamps, the collection includes original stamp art, artists’ books, limited-edition publications, journals, catalogs, reference materials, correspondence art, assemblings, design specifications, posters, and production materials.

30 Day Rubber Stamp Challenge

I came across the 30-day rubber stamp challenge on the excellent Facebook group 'Rubber Stamp Art'. The 30-day rubber stamp challenge consists of making a stamp a day for 30 days. 

I cheated a little bit, some days I didn't make a stamp, other days I made over 4 or 5 stamps. Once I got started it became very addictive, any free moment I made a stamp. 

Rather than making stamps which exploited the medium, such as images to be multiplied, flies, bricks, plant segments and fonts, I made stamps to be used in multiple contexts, like a chapbook printer and their collection of picture letterpress blocks.  

The first sheet of rubber stamp impressions








































The second set of stamp impressions 

The carved stamps for the 1st sheet of stamps

The second set of stamps for the second sheet

Table Top Museum at the Art Workers Guild 2019

Sunday, 22 September 2019
at the Art Workers’ Guild
11 am - 6 pm

The Art Workers' Guild Table Top Museum is back for its fourth year, in conjunction with Open House weekend. Join us for an inventive celebration of the madness and the individual and extraordinary rules of those who collect, organised by Guild member, Stephen Fowler.

Come and delight in an exhibition of 23 installations, curated by Guild members and others selected by invitation, featuring molluscs, plane spotters notebooks, stereoscopes, blank paper and the archive of Zenda, to name but a few. 

The Museum forms part of Open House Weekend.

What is the Table Top Museum?
Have a read of this Fortean Times interview...






Here are some of the collections from the Sunday event ....

Frottage Book

This is a book I made during a workshop organised by Peter Nencini at the Ashridge Summer School.
Created using a soft litho crayon and wallpaper lining.

Mono Printing with Charles Shearer.

I had the great opportunity to attend the brilliant Ashridge Summer School in Devon this year, it's organised by Desdemona Macannon. The superb printer Charles Shearer ran a two colour mono-printing class.

Here is the print I made. 

Neoprene Printing Experiments

Neoprene Printing Experiments. 
Leading up to the UWE summer school class, Oversized Neoprene Foam Printing, I experimented with a variety of techniques, inks and foam sizes.

A2 jigsaw Neoprene foam print, created by oil-based inks, paper stencils and a sprinkling of table salt ( this gives the sparkling white dotted texture) I found A2 neoprene sheets in the euro stores of Barcelona - they were ever so cheap!



To begin to understand how this particular process works I made this two colour monkey print. Neoprene printing is unlike most relief printing such woodcut, linocut and rubber stamp, in fact you can't really describe it as a relief printing process, it's more like a papercut, in that it doesn't have a structure beneath to hold the elements together. 

   

This was made with 2 sheets of neoprene foam, Caligo CMYK Process inks, and a wooden spoon.

Foam bigger than A2 in the UK is rather pricey. However, a far cheaper option is buying the material in large long rolls. 

Excellent Women, an A4 one-sheet book inspired by the Barbara Pym novel. 

Silhouette drawings created using a variety of mark-making tools. 

Caligo process black ink was used, this is easy to clean, all you need is liquid soap and water. It's far easier to clean than any oil-based inks, and unlike most waterbased printing inks, it does cling to the foam, and prints just as effectively as traditional printing inks. 

Together with the excellent women one-page book, I made this two-clour portrait of this character below. Inspired by African fabrics, I cut, carved and made lots of expressive lines and marks with tools and scalpels. I think the two layers play well together, so this will be something to develop further.