Tide line finds

One of the best things about living in St. Leonards is exploring Bulverhythe beach at low tide. In the (almost) three years that we’ve been here, I’ve been learning about the many creatures that live here. Last year I got into a lovely habit of finding a shell, carving a representative rubber stamp, and reading about it. In this way I put together a little store of memories, rubber stamps and knowledge, encompassing cockles, mussels, piddocks, cowries, periwinkles, scallops, netted dog whelks, tusk shells, oysters, limpets, sting winkles and – my personal favourite (and a very precious find) – wendletraps (so far I have found only six of these beauties).

There’s something I love about the manual and embodied process of studying the shell of a mollusc and then working out how to carve its likeness. I love how my physical collection of rubber stamps so closely resembles its sister collection of shells. And I love how my stamps enable me to recreate some sense of the random assemblage that the tide throws up each day… the sea’s daily shell collages.

Last year, I learnt about another printing technique:

1. Take a lump of kneadable eraser, (you can buy these at any fairly decent art store) and knead until soft and pliant. Press it onto a textured surface.
2. Carefully peel your blob from the textured surface, and dab it with an ink pad.
3. Press your single-use stamp onto paper, to create a kind of manual texture-based photo-copy of the object.
4. Marvel at the results.

I really enjoyed doing this on holiday last year in Sicily and got some great impressions of the stylish modernist font denoting the Italian water mains in the town of Bronte – famous for its pistachios.

Back at home, I began wondering if I might do something similar with sea shells and beach finds.

Last week I gathered some things thrown up by the tide. I washed and dried them, then set them down on the table along with ink pads and a stack of brown paper scraps. I carefully pressed the eraser around each shell, inked up the one-time use stamp, then pressed it onto paper. I then cut out all my impressions to make a lovely neat stack of sea shell prints.

They are so tactile, and bear the actual traces and marks of the shells in a way my DIY stamps never can; each one has been a collaboration between me, the shell, ink and paper. An encounter marked by curiosity, presence and touch.

It was fiddly as the shells are very curved and three-dimensional, and stamps need to be flat in order to print. I had to feel my way with slightly flattening out each impression prior to stamping – and trying to do this in a way that didn’t squash out all the textures of the shells. I find the results quite miraculous.

Following this step, I laid all my beach finds onto my scanner and printed a scan onto an A4 sheet of 120gsm matt photo paper.

I folded the paper as per Example #2 in this tutorial to give me a zine of 16 pages, made from a single A4 sheet of paper.

On the back of this paper, I coloured the pages using water-based felt pens in colours reflecting those of my beach finds, and the printing inks I’d used. Onto each page I stuck one of my prints. As a last step, I labelled the finds – piddock, oyster, mussel with barnacle buddies etc. – and cut and folded the zine. I love it so much – I love the idea that you can turn it over and look at the scanned side of the paper, then try to match up the shells on there with the prints on the other side, on the little folded pages.

If you’re reading this on email you won’t be able to see it, but if you’re on my site, there’s a video showing the final zine here.

What do you think; are you ready and excited for making sea shell prints using a kneadable eraser?

Useful information:

You can get both the kneadable eraser (I have stuck 3 together to make a big lump of printing joy and keep it in a little tupperware box) and StaZon permanent ink pads (they are the best in my opinion – excellent crisp impressions, refillable, dry quickly, print onto most surfaces without fuss) at Buddly Crafts in the UK (I have not the heart to link to the domineering Bezos empire). If you want to learn more about how to make zines that celebrate your life, I have a short course running through August that costs £20 for four two-hour lessons to which you can sign up here which will contain similar joy to this post!