Here I’ve been specially commissioned by a client to depict Pendle hill in Lancashire for her sister’s birthday on behalf of her family.

She started by sending me images that she’d taken and asking me to illustrate it in a similar fashion.

I then made a series of drawings and she picked which one to be taken forward with minor changes mainly taken from the example of the other roughs, for example she wanted the lighter foreground from the bottom right hand rough but on the top right one.

I then cut three blocks of lino and printed in the colours specified by the client.

Each layer had to dry before adding the next but the process was sped up by adding cobalt driers to the ink in small amounts. I was also using a registration system using Ternes Burton Pins and corresponding tags that fix onto them to ensure the same placement each time, they’re not fool proof but they do help a great deal!

After printing the project, I probably would have chosen to reprint with colour layers in a more conventional order. Normally you print colours light to dark with black as the last layer, here I brought the brownish green out line of the hill above the blue hill shadow, wanting to bring the hill forward as the focal point but I’m a bit curious to see it printed the other way now.