Excuse me while i first blow the dust off of the website.

Do you ever get that feeling… the more you put something off the more difficult the thought of doing it seems ?. I don’t know why but i often feel that way about updating our website. … So not only are we revealing some new content and showing you what we’ve been working on, but we’re also slaying a little bit of a mini dragon here as well.

At the beginning of January, like so many of us i thought i’d set myself a New Years resolution. To make 1 print a month….. and just like a lot of people, come February, that resolution had gone out of the window . Admittedly, there were extenuating circumstances as to why i wasn’t able to get Februarys print finished… but thats a story for another time. But starting strong in January i wanted to share what BHP had been up to.

Over the last wee while we’ve really “fallen down the rabbit hole” of stamps. Especially the stamps with decorative and commemorative designs. They harken back to very traditional time which we love, and we wanted to share our love for them and do something inspired by them.

It seemed fitting that due to the current times and struggles we’re all continuously living with in these ‘covid days’ i thought it was fitting to do a play on our own favourite national stamp with a nod to the times.

It was definitely a learning experience as i had a very specific look i was going for, and my attempts to create the engraved line through traditional drawing just didn’t seem to be doing justice to what i was envisioning. But after creating our original image in photoshop it dawned on me to add a linear halftone bitmap to create the engraved quality i was going for. All that was left for me to do then, was to cut it.

Here we have the finished results. Before printing and editioning the lino cut, We laser cut a faux perforated edge around the sides of the stamp to give it a real stamp like quality.

We used a Cranfield Deep Red ink and a little touch of black to give the image a deep red, traditional stamp colour.

After this print, we have another couple of stamp ideas in the making , but those will be for other, upcoming months. Keep a weather eye on what we’re getting up to if you liked this piece, more like it coming soon !