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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 […]

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 […]

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! […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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!

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!

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…

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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! […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]