I’m award-winning!

I won, I won! My second Gaelic picture book, Cairistìona Camaillean, has won the Children’s Book Award at the Royal National Mòd in Oban. That means both my books have won the award – what an honour!

Suicide Boobies!

The title of this page really does make sense. I’m going to show you how I made my very first reduction linocut – a technique which Picasso called suicide printing. Here’s why: every time you print a new colour on top of the last colour, you carve more of your lino block away. So once you start …

Amsterdam 1916

This series started with an intriguing little book produced by Amsterdam’s Gemeente (the Council) in 1916, listing every single street, canal, square and quay in the city. Despite the paper being almost a century old, I’ve found that it makes a beautiful surface for lino printing and produces lovely rich, black results on the luscious creamy background. …

Bollmann’s Amsterdam

In 1956 Hermann Bollmann made his famous panoramic map of Amsterdam. It has been reprinted many times but this art is made with a real section of the original, vintage 1956 issue. I carved individual Amsterdam canal houses, based on real examples, out of lino, and lined them up on the map to print with …