Letterpress

This weekend we finally got to do our letterpress course, it was called off a few weeks ago thanks to the snow, so had to be rescheduled.

My brother constructing one of his designs.

Two days of messing around with blocks of type & getting ridiculously inky hands, awesome fun! My brother did the course with me, and there were about 4 other people & 1 tutor. We were shown how to set the type (albeit in a ‘whatever works’ fashion, which is usually my preferable working method anyway… hey, I screenprint on an old piece of ikea kitchen cupboard), how to ink and how to print using the imperial press.

You can see the printed version of this at the end of the post.

There was also an opportunity to use the smaller Adana presses, but having tried one before and realising the limitations (1 colour, smaller print area & big cleanup) we decided to stick to the bigger press and have fun with chunky type.

We used a mixture of wooden and plastic type in a variety of fonts, and had fun assembling different phrases & designs for two days. I came away with some framable prints that I’m pretty proud of, including a quote from a Neil Gaiman comic & a Twin Peaks reference. I’ll show you these in-situ at some point ‘cos they’re still drying!

Here’s a dead simple one that I did for my currently naked office wall, it’s totally not straight (needs trimming up.. it was hard to get the registration right on the big press without lots of work) but I love the colour.

The letterpress course was held at the West Yorkshire Print Workshop in Mirfield and cost £120 for two days. All materials were provided, and I’d totally recommend it if you want a nice, easy & fun introduction to the art of letterpress.