The Goodwill Merchant

If you read my last blog post (Printing with a view - 27 April 2011) you would have seen my girlfriend and me were house sitting out in the country for a week. At the end I mentioned I was also working on another print during that week and would be posting soon...

The Goodwill Merchant





About the print
The Goodwill Merchant
Colour: 2 Layers - cyan on cyan
Size: A3
Edition: 10
Stock: 340gsm Revive 50:50 Matt
Signed and numbered (note: not photographed)

Buy Beard Sea on Etsy:


After a bit of internet research about the area we were staying in for the week, I found out about a ship that wrecked in 1976 on the coast nearby - Goodwill Merchant. The article linked mentioned of some the lost cargo of the ship being new cars. All the work that went into manufacturing and shipping the cars, just lost like that. Don't mess with the sea.


The print is also a nod towards how some cars on the islands were disposed of until not too long ago (see youtube video I came across a few years back: !!!)


I began thinking about the amount of car parts at the bottom of the ocean around Shetland.

Process and (lack of) time
So time really went way too fast during the last three days house sitting, and I had to rush away to Aberdeen at the end of the week, leaving no time to update this here blog.

Wed 27 - Research, Initial drawing and layout:


Thurs 28 - Finish Layer 1 inking + Beetle - photographed below, crawled up the leg of my jeans whilst I was inking, aaah!

+ After some heavy inking over the 2 days I finally finish on Thursday night.



Thursday night ends with a late night journey to town to print film positives for exposure to screen for Friday morning.

It was quite strange, after printing the film I drove past this wrecked car, which looked like it had possibly been fished out of the harbour. (poor quality phone pic)


The 2 positive films held together in the light, can kind start to get a taste of how the print will work:


Fri 29 - The main reason we were house sitting was to look after 4 excellent cats. One of which is a natural hunter - he brought us 2 rabbits and on the last morning, this mouse, who had seen better days but survived!

Exposure of screen + printing. Here is a pic of the garage converted to temporary print workshop. Note the bamboo drying racks: its the way forward!


Then there was a mad dash to catch my flight. No time to even blink on the last day! But really pleased with how much I managed to get done over the week.

Well that's my holidays, now back to my day job.