
New prints “Farmyard Animals”
After creating the Winter Drifts lino prints back in 2017 I’d wanted to revisit two colour animal prints, and produce them as screenprints this time. Lots of different geometric prints had inspired me, and I wanted to carry that into my new prints. I hadn’t intended to create four farm animals; they were the ones […]

Quotation prints
My quotation prints continue to develop, and with my latest going on sale earlier this year, I wanted to look at back at the current four and look at their inspiration and design. Alice and I both love the film Amélie; we think it’s the most romantic film. Using a quote from the film seemed […]

New print “Beach Findings”
While on holiday in St. Davids last year, I created a flurry of sketches to be used as new print ideas, including one called “Beach Findings”. The inspiration came from all the beaches we’ve been to in Cornwall and Wales. You can see the original sketch below. It is very rough, and also quite small! […]

New animal prints for Spring 2020
At the start of the year, I wanted to create prints that would potentially be formed of one colour only. Having created single colour screen printed fabric designs for Alice to use as a background print for her purses a few years ago, I wanted to explore this further, and bring in an animal element […]

New print series “Majestic Animals”
When I decided to do another series of animal prints, I came up with the idea of making them look like travel posters for animals, showing them with their natural environment springing up behind them like a stage set and the animal taking centre stage. It was a new and novel way of envisaging animals […]

New prints “Running Hare” and “Crow Flight”
I have long admired printmakers who use all available space in the print, but make it seem natural. I decided to make a couple of mono linocuts in this way but also make them vertical in format. And I had to print the running hare as it’s now my logo. Below are the original sketches. […]

New print “Orchard Harvest”
At the same time I worked on the Seaside Garden print I also sketched the idea for an Orchard at harvest time. I love all things quintessentially English and an apple orchard certainly is that. I was influenced by the start of Peter Greenaway’s film Drowning By Numbers, with all the moths crawling around in […]

New print “Seaside Garden”
I’m very happy to share with you this new print of mine called “Seaside Garden” and to show you its development from sketches to finished print. I worked on this print last year. I knew I wanted to do a seaside garden and was inspired greatly by Derek Jarman’s garden and house at Dungeness. There […]

New print “Cove”
I’m pleased to share with you this new print in my “Safe Harbours” series called “Cove”. I thought you might like to see the development of the idea. Last year (in 2018) I was coming up with a lot of ideas for “Safe Harbours” including “Safe Harbour”,”Stone Harbour” and “Tin Mine”. They were me experimenting […]

New print series “Sleeping Animals”
In the Summer of 2018, Alice told me that I ought to design some more “Christmas” prints for all the fairs we do leading up to Christmas. My idea was to do sleeping animals. Not very Christmassy at all! I just couldn’t face doing something really Christmassy. So, during the Summer I sketched these sleeping […]

New Safe Harbours print “Tin Mine”
I’m delighted to announce this new screen print in my Safe Harbours series which is titled “Tin Mine”. Inspired by the rugged moors of Cornwall, this is a bit of a departure for me as it sees my work becoming a bit more abstract, whilst still retaining the safe and welcoming feel of my Safe […]

Treasure: Lisa Hammond
So, this is probably the ceramic that started us off on our epic love of ceramics, a journey which has taken us quite far! I bought this tall ceramic container from a place in London (when we used to live in London) a long time ago. I think it was from a place called Contemporary […]

Treasure: The Cloud Pottery
Juliet Macleod is the potter behind The Cloud Pottery and she makes these wonderful ceramics which are inspired by the sea. I love the way Juliet combines brush strokes with sgraffito mark making to bring her ceramics to life and to evoke that coastal feeling in quite abstract ways. With these two ceramics we own […]

Treasure: RAMP Ceramics
This is a new series of blog posts from me called “treasure” because the posts are about pieces of work that we are lucky enough to own and love. We have long loved the work of RAMP (Roop & Al Make Pots) which is a creative partnership between Alice Hartford and Rupert Johnstone. They met at […]

Safe Harbours – a new series
I have long been inspired by places which are special to me. Places which are off the beaten track or which instill the feeling of having discovered somewhere secret. I’m sure you all have these places too. For me, some of them are from childhood, hidden places to play. Some are local, such as islands […]

Inspiration: Bryan Angus
I’m going to post regularly about illustrators, printmakers, painters and artists who inspire me. The first person I’d like to talk about is Bryan Angus. Bryan Angus is an artist based in Banff on the North Aberdeenshire coast, or as he says “otherwise known as the Banffshire Coast”. In the past he has painted and […]

The first Brighton Print Fair 2017
Raspberry and I visited the first Tutton and Young Brighton Print Fair last weekend at PHOENIX (which seems to be an arts centre). In fact, it took two visits to really take it all in. We were just about the first people in on the first day (lovely and quiet) and it was a great […]

Screen print, linocut or woodcut?
I have now used screen printing, linocut and woodcut methods to produce prints so I thought I’d write a little bit about why I’d choose each one for different situations. Screen printingTo me, screen printing is a beautiful and highly desirable printing medium. The resultant prints are very high quality with solid blocks of colour […]

Prints I love for your hallway and stairs
I think many people have a lot of unused space on the walls of their hallway and stairs, it can be the perfect place to display prints. Not large prints and not necessarily focal pieces but I’m suggesting you might want to go for ones with lots of interest, which grab and hold your attention (or […]

Farm Yarns range – from ideas to finished pieces
The second range I designed began in late 2014. I have been obsessed with fields for years now, especially the layering of different fields as abstract patchworks of textures. Very early on I started to get the idea of doing a design which was itself a patchwork of different elements including field boundaries such as […]

Teasel and Hare screen print
Late in 2016 Alice asked me to come up with a design for a new lampshade for our home. I know this was a tactic she uses to help me to get working on stuff for myself because when I try to do things for myself I find it extremely hard to do anything. I […]

Boundaries: the second half of the story
You may remember that I recently posted about designing and printing new boundaries patterns in collaboration with Alice. Well she has taken the four fabrics and created these beautiful purses with her hand made felt and embroidery. They are now available in Alice’s Folksy shop here: folksy.com/shops/raspberry We will be working on more collaborations in the […]

Taking stock of my styles
So, recently I decided that I definitely do want to print again. And I need something to print. The only criteria is that it needs to be something I enjoy doing. The openness of that brief makes it very difficult to decide on what I want to print but also another very important aspect has […]

Boundaries: half the story
First of all, I have a little explaining to do as to why I’ve been so quiet. I’ve been out of the loop of screen printing for what seems like the past year. Anxiety struck me hard when my first two ranges started to sell and were becoming successful. The success and pressure of needing to deliver […]

Cover Story – from idea to finished work
I’ve always been very inspired and influenced by trees in the landscape of England, and I’m especially interested in the visual layering I see all around me in rural Hampshire. Lines of trees sit atop fields with hedgerow boundaries, walls and fences. Cover Story was the first range which I printed and was one of the […]

Farm Yarns range printed
The Farm Yarns cushion and lampshade printing went very well indeed and I’ve now printed a run of lampshades and both cushion designs. These are all available at my Etsy and Folksy stores. Although it’s been a huge amount of work, making up screens, printing and cleaning out screens, I have found the process very […]

Farm Yarns ink mixing
I spent most of Saturday mixing, checking and changing the inks for the new Farm Yarns range in preparation for printing – I’m very happy with how the colours are looking!

First Cover Story cushions printed
These are the first cushions I have printed, and are from the Cover Story range. I created one ‘focal’ cushion design and twelve more abstract cushion designs for the range, selected four of them to print first of which this is the first one – printed in two different colourways. It doesn’t even have a name yet!

Countryside design
So, this is the basic countryside design…from here some of the elements will become background (colour) only and some will become foreground only but I’m pretty happy with this! From this the entire range will grow…

First proper production run of lampshades
This weekend I’ve started my first real production run, fixing three things which weren’t quite right before: artwork is now correct size for lampshade, ink colours are now correct and I used hardboard platens to fix the linen to for the entire six screen print run so the fabric will remain in place. Today I […]

Mixing Ink
Today I’ve sorted out another important part of printing these ranges – getting the colours exactly as I designed them. The first lampshade test prints were pretty good but the yellow was too bright and the dark blue was too dark. In order to mix these Permatone inks properly I had to invest in some […]

From design to print
When I last wrote I had got as far as having a set of almost finished ideas for my leaf and tree range. Since then, I have pretty much finalised this particular range of designs. It has expanded too! I have now got a different “focal” design for vertical, horizontal and square formats. Each one […]

So here it is…the first lampshade prototype, printed with six screens!
Finally I am really happy with my printing process. Just a couple of things to fix – the colours are slightly off (the yellow should be dirtier and the dark blue should be a little lighter) plus the design needs to be slightly smaller on the lampshade. Thanks to William for the photos of me! […]

Printing first half of lampshade artwork
I promised an update today and here it is: I completed printing the right hand part of the trees and leaves lampshade design onto linen! The printing has gone really well, the only thing which is slightly wrong are the colours which I need to get right for my first production run. I bought some […]

Screen Printing Workshop
Had a brilliant workshop at Squeegee and Ink today, incredibly helpful in getting my technique right! Thank you Chessie! My test prints of my lampshade onto fabric went really well, even though I managed to make one of the screens with the wrong panel of artwork and the colours are not correct…very pleased and pretty […]

Starting out (again) but this time for real
My name’s John Bloor, and I’m trying to make a big career change from working for people as a graphic designer to becoming a designer and maker. In the dim and distant past I used to make fonts and I always used to get crazy emails from bands (usually metal bands) asking if they could […]