-About Us-
BlueHandStudio
Hi! We’re BlueHandStudio, a small business from the West of Ireland specialising in creating handmade linen block prints made with indigo ink. We cut all of our printing blocks by hand from lino and print with traditional relief printing and calico techniques, with a method rich in the history and stories of the European calico printers of the 18th century. Our original prints take inspiration from the Irish countryside and the rest feature designs done after famous fine artists including Hokusai, Rembrandt and Durer, among others.
The Artist – Handmade Linen Block Prints
My name is Alex, and I run BlueHandStudio together with my father. I’ve always been interested in art and history, ever since I was a child, so when my father introduced me to indigo linen printing I was hooked immediately. I design all of our original block prints from sketching to final design with a combination of traditional paper media and digital touch-ups. These are then scanned and printed.
The Blue Hand
BlueHandStudio is named after a dyeworks that was active in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, in the late 18th century, Blåa Handen (The Blue Hand), which was itself named after the indigo pigment that stained its workers’ hands.
The dyeworks would last under this name for several years until a careless employee caused a fire in the building that quickly spread to over a quarter of Stockholm, leading to Blåa Handen becoming a somewhat infamous name and the unfortunate employee being fired and presumably blacklisted by every dyeworks in the country. The dyeworks itself would remain (under a different name, mind you) until the end of the 19th century.
Tobias Lang and Indigo Block Prints
The indigo printing technique that was once known as China Blue dates back to the English block printers of the 18th century. It was kept as a well-guarded secret by those in the know – industrial espionage was common, and the techniques and quantities of ingredients needed to achieve the rich indigo hue characteristic to this technique were like gold dust.
One printer in particular, Tobias Lang, was working on the small island of Gotland, Sweden, in the late 1700s. He worked with a method of reducing indigo pigment that produced a light blue halo around the finely printed linework of his delicate floral designs, although he referred to the technique as Englischer Blau (English Blue). A blog post detailing Tobias Lang’s exploits can be found here!
