Make your own Christmas cards!

Receiving a handmade card makes Christmas even more special and making cards to send is rewarding and gets you into the Christmas spirit! It is a fun activity for the holidays and creating something especially for family and friends makes it that much more meaningful.

If you’d like to use printmaking to make a series of cards we have tools and materials for making lino cut prints and silkscreen prints. Or you can of course draw or paint your cards as individual works of art or scan one of your paintings and use our quality inkjet papers to make digital cards using your own artwork.

Block printing cards

Lino-cut is a simple, inexpensive and fun way of making your own cards that can also double up as beautiful limited edition artworks! Lino-printing is a wonderfully effective and easy way to try printmaking in your home or studio. If you haven’t tried it before you might be surprised at the quality of the outcome. We have a number of printmaking books that will help you get started and we have a growing Printmaking Department with a variety of tools and inks to choose from.

For lino print we have luscious water-based inks from Schmincke and Lukas plus Caligo Safewash oil-based relief inks. The Schmincke colours include gold and silver for lovely holiday touches. The Georgian block printing oil medium mixes with regular oil colour to achieve the consistency you need for successful oil based lino printing. The Lascaux Tusches for resist printing help you with more eleborate texhniques. Our Speedball screenprinting kits have all the tools you will need to get started and our Permaset screenprint inks and the System3, AV and Golden silkscreen mediums to add to any acrylic colour means a wide range of colours is available to you.

We offer two types of lino – the conventional grey slabs as well as the new soft cut blocks, which allow for a larger range of marks with your cutter. The beautiful Fabriano blank greetings cards with envelopes work well for printmaking as well as for painting watercolours. We stock our own and Hahnemuehle’s blank postcards and a wide range of papers that you can use for printing (the heavyweight cartridge paper from Daler-Rowney is a good choice at a good price and so lovely and smooth). In addition to our range of standard lino cutters we stock the very high-quality Swiss-made professional lino cutting tools from Pfiel. This range is in a league of its own, designed for the finest, crispest marks and unparalleled durability. A bench hook is a useful tool for controlling the block while you are cutting and that makes it a bit safer as well.

Finally, if you are using the lino cut technique you will need a roller to spread an even coating of ink on your design and after you apply the paper to your block you will need to press or rub the back of the paper to transfer the ink. Many people find the back of a wooden spoon works well for this part of the process but we do stock two lino presses and you might find these useful.

Materials for printmaking

If you wish to draw or paint your cards as individual works of art we have gold, silver and white marker pens and metallic pencils to help with an extra festive look!