After months away from the printing press I have spent the last two days indulging in examining and printing a  beautiful array of seaweed samples that  I collected  on the west coast of Ross-shire and Sutherland whist I was undertaking research into beach litter for my Littoral art project.

Seaweeds have so many similarities with the botanical  forms that I have worked with that I decided to find out more about them  by taking an introductory course in Seaweeds at the University of Edinburgh

In the six weeks of study we began to glimpse the extraordinary range of seaweeds around our shorelines and started to understand the categorisations of the algae washed up on beaches we know.

As with  botanical prints pressing samples carefully  is extremely important, even more so with the fine seaweeds that don’t have a strong internal structure.  I began experimenting  ways of pressing and preserving  seaweeds for printing. The seaweeds in these prints are all from the Loch Broom area.

The wracks seen here print well being strong enough to take a firm pressure through the  rollers, while the finer more delicate seaweeds need a damper paper and less pressure to  achieve a good print.

These prints have been made as rewards for crowd funding sponsors of my  littoral art project and as such I decided to print them on sustainable paper using  Khadi paper (recycled fabric fibre) and newspaper in keeping with the underpinning project message that we need to use less and to recycle more to help maintain a resilient environment.

Tomorrow they will be being packaged up and posted to my sponsors. I hope you like them! Seaweed prints made for sale will be posted soon.