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Two workshops for young letterpress printers
We enjoy inviting young friends to our studio. We've found it to be a great way to offer a short break to our parenting friends as well as offering a hands-on experience to a new generation of letterpress printers which really excites us a lot. We also hope it offers some good social benefits as well.
"Thank you card" workshop
We think a great project to do with young people is to design and print their own thank you cards. Hopefully that will help them recognize some social responsibility for people who have offered them something. "Thank you CARDS" are just a lot better idea than "thank you EMAILS." We'll report back later and see if we thought it worked.
We were introducing our two young friends to our handrolling technique on the paper stock. At another time we will actually print the "thank you" overtop of it. The technique has a nice sense of being handmade. It is interesting to watch how differently people can work with the same technique making them unique to their own vision of what they want. This workshop had Lucie (above) and Karlene (below).
What we really needed was some way to print up the glass plate where we were mixing the ink. Slowly over the workshop the color began to merge more and more into the same purple. I think we'll try to include a bit more information on color MIXING and color SEPARATING in future workshops.
The results of some of their effort. At the next workshop with these two friends we'll overprint with some metal and/or wood type and print a bit of a colophon on the back. We can't wait to see the final result.
We love the freeform quality and spontaneity of working this way. No particular planning. Just jumping in and letting the ink happen.
"Holiday card" workshop
This workshop was designed to produce holiday cards. The hard part is not wanting to take over the project for ourselves, but to serve as "printer's devils" for our "creative directors."
Kieran inking up his form which was a bit more of a holiday broadside. The tongue is a 'patent applied for' technique for getting the right visual texture to the ink.
This picture captures the moment for sure. There is something nice about that piece of blank paper that magically appears with the image.
We are going to build a catwalk to help balance the height of press versus our younger printer's devils. Keeping the gripper pedal in play may be a bit of an engineering problem.
Kieran with his first portfolio piece.
Kieran's sister, Annika, really got into her holiday card, producing it on one of our proofing presses. You can tell things are going right when the teeth gritting gets to this level.
We need to watching out for those sleeves and ink, although in this particular workshop we survived it without incident.
Annika and her golden result.