PRINT WORKSHOP

Today we attended a print workshop, the aim of which was to introduce us to different printing techniques and let us experiment with them. There were three different types of printing that we could try-out ; letter press, lino cut prints and mono-printing. As we only had a certain amount of time, I first chose to experiment with a printing technique I had never worked with, letterpress.

Firstly, I searched through the boxes of type to find fonts that work with each other. Once I had found the letters I needed I planned out my composition and inked up the letters. I produced two prints, both have no relevance to my current work as they are experimental prints. Once I had finished using a letter it had to be cleaned, this had to be done a special way to make sure all think excess ink is removed. Firstly, you apply oil to a cloth, using this you clean the letter. Then using a mixture of washing up liquid and water you clean the letter once more, removing any oil or ink that had been missed.  As there was a large group we had to hand press the letters, this caused some letters to lose clarity due to a lack of pressure.  

After producing my two letterpress prints I moved on to the next printing station. Here, I worked with the lino cut printing technique to reproduce a letterform that I created for the alphabet soup – visual thinking brief. The typeface is based on sound waves, so there was a lot of curved lines that were difficult to recreate accurately using the gouge. Due to the difficulty of creating a waved line the print didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted it, to look like the original there needed to be a greater quantity of lines and they needed to be more fluid. Finally, after producing the first print there was still ink on the plate, therefore, I printed it a second time which resulted in a subtle grey outcome. Although linocut printing is a useful technique it is only suitable for certain pieces.