art materials – Gerry Mooney Illustrating Dickens

The Inimitable Dickens Universe!

Before I write about the privelege of attending this event, I want to thank ALL MY FRIENDS (and a few strangers!) for supporting my gofundme campaign, which allowed me to attend the Dickens Universe at all.

The Dickens Project has been doing this incredible, week-long event at UC Santa Cruz for 46 years, so they’re certainly good at it! The Dickens Universe so far surpassed anything I anticipated that I am still gathering my thoughts, but I wanted to put something down before it faded, like some fantastic dream.

First of all, and most of all, everyone I met and talked to was an absolute delight. In a crowd of about 250 attendees, ages ranged from…actually, age seems a silly delimiter in this context, to be honest! What made everyone instant best friends was a deep, abiding and humble admiration for the work of Charles Dickens.

My Fortune Cookie

So I’ve been pretty psyched about this trip to Santa Cruz. I walk around the house “writing” my class lectures in my head, making lists of supplies we’ll need, and I’ve gotten a couple of questions from students already, about what they need to bring, what to expect, etc.

I correspond pretty regularly with the event organizer, and among other things, have learned that UC Santa Cruz has been putting on The Dickens Universe for 46 years! It’s all exciting and the anticipation has pretty much taken over, and I’m fine with it.

One Thing I Got Is Class.

…and it’s getting bigger! Namely, the enrollment for my linoleum-printing class at the Dickens Universe in July is growing. The Dickens Project, organizer of the event at UC Santa Cruz, have been promoting the class in their newsletter and on Facebook, and it’s getting results. 17 so far have enrolled and I believe they’re limiting it to 40, which should be workable.

Many of the enrollees have posted questions, however it’s all posted on a Google sheet, not set up to easily post answers. They did start asking folks for email addresses, so that will help.

The Dickens Universe Heats Up!

First I would like to thank those of you who have contributed to my GoFundMe campaign. I’ve already begun making lists, and buying paper, supplies and equipment for this adventure, and the lists keep growing!

I know folks have reservations about contributing money online, and maybe some folks just dislike GoFundMe and their ilk, and I understand. I would like you to know that if you want to help me in this endeavor, I can also accept money through the following methods, which don’t take a fee out of the donations.

Barnes & Noble Lino Demonstration – VIDEO

The B&N store on 71st St. in Tulsa was kind enough to allow me to hold my second book signing/lino printing demonstration on Saturday, Sept. 11 and it went just fine!

Several friends showed up and I even snagged a couple of new fans among the passing customers. Special big thanks to Vicki’s longtime friend Marty Sikes for handling the camera duties on the spur of the moment.

Book signing and Linoleum Printing Demonstration

Promotional poster for a book signing event with Gerry Mooney, illustrator of Charles Dickens' Bleak House, featuring details about a linoleum block printing demonstration at Barnes & Noble, Tulsa, on September 13, 2025.

If you’re in the Tulsa area it would be great to see you at my second book signing and lino print demonstration, 1PM on Saturday, Sept. 13.

The Barnes & Noble Store is across from Woodland Hills Mall on 71st St., and the store staff has offered to help me live-stream the event on Facebook, so there’s an opportunity to watch right from your couch!

In other news, I expect to be traveling to London in October to speak at Dickens Day at the University of London. I’ll have more info about this soon.

Today’s Linocut Artists

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the work of other linoleum artists. The fact is that since I seek out and view so much art on Facebook, my feed these days is almost exclusively art of various types, from Golden Age comic art to Disney animation, character sketching, political cartoons, Renaissance work, cave paintings, you name it. And I like it fine!

What has really grabbed my attention of course is the work of other linoleum artists, which I find utterly humbling. I’m very happy with the work I do, but in essence my pieces are a single image printed in black ink on white paper, and if you’ve read my posts on my “Christmas Carol” experiments, you know I struggle with anything more complex.

How “A Christmas Carol” Ends

Man, I really didn’t want to write this post. I had big plans, as I wrote about in my post of Sept. 10. Create a set of charming scenes from Charles Dickens’s holiday classic as three-color linoleum prints, and do it in time to sell them for this Christmas season in my Etsy shop, which I set up primarily to try selling some of my BLEAK HOUSE prints. Ambitious but doable, I thought.

It actually started out very well. I developed my sketches into imagery that I was very happy with. I enjoyed designing the lettering with a loose but classical sort of letterform, and of course thinking about and drawing the characters was a lot of fun. I was making good progress! The key factor was time, since I was starting maybe a little late for the holidays, due to the complexity and somewhat experimental nature of the project.

A Christmas Carol

I recently started an Etsy shop (since closed!) to offer prints of a couple of my BLEAK HOUSE illustrations. I’ve done a soft launch but the fact is my offerings so far are pretty slim. I know a couple of images I’ve done for this project have a broader appeal, but growing a shop like this based on what I’ve done for this one book has some problems. So as I said, a soft launch just to get some feedback, but it is certainly off to a slow start. It would be nice to have something special to offer for Christmas.

I love “A Christmas Carol” as much as anyone, but mostly the movies (Mr. Magoo is my favorite!). I hadn’t read the text for a long time, but recently I read it again as a way to refresh my Dickens knowledge. I pretty quickly felt moved to do some sketching, in a way that movies do not inspire me. Interesting!

“The Last Picture” Show

As promised in my previous post, I’ve completed a “making of” video of the final large illustration for my BLEAK HOUSE project. It’s not the last chronologically in the book, just the last one to get to. In fact there are two more small, or “spot” illustrations still to do, and those I can do in a few days or a week at most.

The larger ones take more time to work out a more elaborate composition, and can take a month. Shooting a video while doing this work adds a great deal to to process, and of course cutting and editing a video can be time consuming, but I hope the results are worth your time.