INRODUCTION

"To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic"

Humphry Osmond.

Hello folks and welcome to my new blog, which is exclusively dedicated

to the fantastic world of blotter art, this blog will be dedicated to the vintage form of the art, by vintage I mean blotter that was intended to be dipped and circulated, some of the examples you will see will have been dipped at one point, but most won't have been, these blotters will have been saved at the time of production and kept as mementos, the main characteristics of blotters that have been dipped is a brown stain left by the chemicals as it degrades, due to the contact to air and UV light.   

I hope you enjoy the art work and the history behind such a fantastic subject, please feel free to comment also I am always on the lookout for new and old samples to photograph!

Farmer Dodds

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO BLOTTER ART

At the time LSD [Lysergic acid diethylamide] was made illegal, mandatory sentences were based on the weight of the substances with which an offender was caught with. Therefore a person busted with one dose of acid on a sugar cube that weighed 1 gram would get the same sentence as a dealer caught with 1 gram of LSD crystal, which would represent around 10,000 doses; it wasn’t long before new lightweight mediums for distributing LSD started to appear. 

The new mediums include minute pills called micro dots, which were smaller than a match head, gelatine squires also appeared dosed with LSD, called window panes, this was also the birth of the blotter, LSD was simply dropped onto sheets of un-perforated blotting paper, later sheets perforated into measured hits started to appear, then coloured paper was used and the designs began to become more elaborate, it also let people put their own brand or logo on the paper, setting one batch from another.

Over the years hundreds of blotter designs, ranging from simple rubber stamped images to complex works of art have appeared. Now the name of this form of art has become recognized as blotter art, which is now being seen for what it truly is, folk art.