Why Glazes Crackle and Crack: A Plain Ceramic Primer
Glaze is melted glass bonded to clay, and it cracks when glass and clay shrink at different rates — a materials story of silica, flux, and thermal expansion every potter meets early.
Little Birdie Studio
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The Bayeux Tapestry Comes to London for Its First UK Display in Over 900 Years
The 11th-century embroidery — some 70 metres of stitched narrative — has been confirmed for display at the British Museum from September 2026, the first time it has returned to Britain since it was made.
How Risograph Printing Layers One Vivid Colour at a Time
Risograph Printing Layers Bold Colour Through a Spinning Ink Drum
A duplicator built for offices in 1950s Japan has become the print studio of choice for illustrators chasing texture, cost and glorious imperfection.
Illustration
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How Does Watercolour Granulation Work?
A guide to the speckled, mineral-flecked textures that appear when certain pigments settle unevenly across the page, and how illustrators put the effect to work.
Why Gouache Illustration Keeps Pulling Illustrators Back to the Brush
Gouache dries flat, opaque and matte yet rewets with water, which is why studios from the mid-century print era to the 2020s keep reaching for it.
How Book Cover Illustration Begins Long Before the First Brushstroke
A cover illustrator solves problems of genre, scale and typography before any paint is mixed, because a jacket must survive the size of a thumbnail.
Why Hand-Drawn Illustrated Maps Are Quietly Flourishing Again
Illustrated maps trade cold precision for character, and a new generation of artists is drawing British towns the way memory holds them.
Design
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How Does Risograph Printing Actually Work?
A layered, one-colour-at-a-time process that turns a stencil and a spinning drum into the grainy, glowing prints illustrators can't stop making.
How textile motifs travel: paisley's long route to Britain
The paisley teardrop began as a Persian boteh, crossed the mountains into Kashmiri weaving and reached Scottish looms via fashionable Europe — a motif that migrated for centuries before it settled on ties and scarves.
The invisible grid: how book pages are actually designed
A book page looks like a neutral container, but every margin, line spacing and running head answers to a grid — one of the oldest and quietest pieces of design there is.
What British railway posters still teach designers
Between 1923 and 1947 Britain's four railway companies flooded the country with bold colour lithographs, and the lessons inside those posters still hold for anyone composing an image to be read in seconds.
Spotlight
Weaving on a frame loom begins with a well-spaced warp
Warping a frame loom with even tension and the right thread spacing, then building a first piece of plain weave row by patient row.
Britain's £90,000 VAT Threshold Draws a Line for Growing Craft Businesses
The rule that decides when a maker's turnover tips them from hobbyist into VAT-registered trader, and what the deadlines actually require.
Cut-paper collage techniques begin with Matisse's late cut-outs
Cut-paper techniques drawn from Matisse's late cut-outs, from painting sheets of colour to composing with positive and negative shapes.
When a Craft Hobby Becomes a Business: The UK Tax Basics Makers Ask About
The £1,000 trading allowance, the October registration deadline and the records that save an evening of panic — a plain-language map of the moment making starts counting as trading.
Tutorials
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Paper marbling for beginners starts with a carrageenan bath
The carrageenan bath method for floating colour, raking patterns and lifting them cleanly onto paper at a kitchen table.
Five embroidery stitches for beginners carry almost every pattern
Back stitch, stem stitch, satin stitch, French knots and detached chain cover the outlines, fills and petals of nearly every embroidery pattern.
Three slip decoration techniques transform clay at the leather-hard stage
Slip trailing, sgraffito and inlay compared as three routes to pattern at the forgiving leather-hard stage of clay.
Screen printing at home needs only a screen, a squeegee and a kitchen table
A complete home method using paper stencils, a 43T mesh screen and one firm squeegee pass to print textiles from the kitchen table.
Crafts News
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Laura Boswell Carves Her Print Blocks Away to Capture Scotland's Wild Coastline
Crafts Council Calls For Bold Craft Installations At Collect Open 2027
Independent makers and collectives are invited to pitch ambitious, craft-led proposals for the next edition of Somerset House's celebrated showcase.
Cyanotype Turns Two Iron Salts and an Afternoon of Sunlight Into Unfading Prussian Blue
Teaching Craft Classes Pays When the Arithmetic Is Honest
Workshop income looks like easy money until you price the prep hours, the hall hire and the half who book but do not come — here is the real economics of teaching what you make.
Art News
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The Box, Plymouth Wins Art Fund Museum of the Year 2026
Plymouth's museum, gallery and archive took the £120,000 prize at a ceremony aboard the Cutty Sark, seeing off a shortlist that included the National Gallery and the Fitzwilliam.
Selling Print Editions: How Numbering, Sizes and Prices Hold Hands
A limited edition is a promise printed in pencil — the numbers on the left, the edition size on the right, and a price ladder that only works if both stay honest.
Artist's Resale Right Explained: The Royalty That Follows a Work for Decades
When a painting resells at auction in the UK, a slice of the hammer price legally belongs to the artist — here is how droit de suite works, who pays and what sellers must do.
Lubaina Himid Carries Britain to the Venice Biennale
The Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid CBE is representing Britain at the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, filling the British Council's pavilion in the Giardini with work the first reviews call uncomfortable and tender at once.