Gerry Mooney Illustrating Dickens

The Ghost’s Walk

Mrs. Rouncewell, Rosa, and Watt Rouncewell

She seats herself in a large chair by the fast-darkening window and tells them: “In the wicked days, my dears, of King Charles the First–I mean, of course, in the wicked days of the rebels who leagued themselves against that excellent king–Sir Morbury Dedlock was the owner of Chesney Wold. Whether there was any account of a ghost in the family before those days, I can’t say. I should think it very likely indeed.”

Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

Mr. Krook

As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was blinded besides by the wall of Lincoln’s Inn, intercepting the light within a couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted lantern that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying about in the shop. Turning towards the door, he now caught sight of us.

‘Hi, hi!’ said the old man, coming to the door. ‘Have you anything to sell?’

Books, Art and History

Chiaroscuro Woodcuts

As a rule I’ve stuck to just one-color linocuts mainly because my printing setup at the moment is fairly primitive. What I want to talk about here is going to be about woodcuts, but the same rules apply to linocuts and the process of pulling prints.

The main thing to solve when doing more than one color in a hand-pulled print, is getting the colors to line up. In any multi-color printing process, this is called “registration” and it applies to pretty much all color printing, whether it’s magazines, cereal boxes, or your inkjet printer. You know when you put a new ink cartridge in and you have to print out that one sample page? That’s so your printer can register the colors.

Proofing with a rubbing

I haven’t seen this method of proofing on any other linocut websites (and there are quite a few!) but it may be because I’m always trying to squeeze more detail out of a fairly “coarse” medium.

This video goes into the process of proofing with a rubbing, in order to see what is actually cut. Since the process is to do a black line drawing on the lino, then cut away everything else, it’s often difficult to “see” the cut areas clearly as work progresses. The rubbing reveals all this easily.

Allan Woodcourt and Jo

‘Stop him, stop him!’ cries the woman, almost breathless. ‘Stop him, sir!’

He darts across the road into the boy’s path, but the boy is quicker than he, makes a curve, ducks, dives under his hands, comes up half-a-dozen yards beyond him, and scours away again. Still the woman follows, crying, ‘Stop him, sir, pray stop him!’

Why Linoleum?

There are a few materials that have been traditionally used for coating with ink and pulling prints by hand. The most common, linoleum and wood, have no intrinsic quality that makes them suitable for inking and pressing paper onto to make a print. Any flat surface will do, in fact there are many other mediums (steel plates, copper, even potatoes!) that are used one way or another for making prints.

Mr.Tulkinghorn and Lady Dedlock

“Lady Dedlock?”

She does not speak at first, nor even when she has slowly dropped into the easy chair by the table. They look at each other, like two pictures.

Mr. Guppy and Tony Jobling

Mr. Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and balancing all these possibilities in his mind, continues thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, until he hastily draws his hand away.

‘What, in the devil’s name,’ he says, ‘is this! Look at my fingers!’

Mr. Turveydrop

“He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear.