A Letterpress print play day

On Thursday we happily hosted a group of 6 artists/printmakers from Brisbane for an introduction to Letterpress printmaking. They were a great bunch of women, co-ordinated by Sandra Pearce of Art From The Urban Wilderness - a community art centre in Brisbane, and together we managed to learn heaps, laugh a lot, print some great things, eat a delicious lunch, share birthday cake and experiment! It was a full day and full of joy as well.

Here are same happy snaps of the day.

Talking about letters that could go either way, and how to work out what is the bottom of the letter and what is the top - here you can see the N is upside down and would print differently to the O - making the line line of print look wobbly.

Barry joined us after lunch and was a mighty help!

Getting the alignment right.

Deep in conversation about something!

A good example of how a letter placed upside in the chase, prints above the base line of the rest of the type...ss in darkness.

However, the printmakers liked it that way and kept printing! Three pairs of printers made three postcards and we all shared them. 

Selecting wood type for the galley press printing. We had a lot of fun with this random layout of ransom-note letters and numbers and punctuation.

Towards the end I got to play with it too, and here I scrunched up some tissue paper, and filled the gaps around it with some small off-cuts. I loved the result - the fracturing of letters when I straightened the tissue paper out.

And finally, an ingenious solution to how to transport an open tub of cream back to Brisbane safely - a glove, of course!