Letterpress
Me and Hannah went down to Vernon Street to get ourselves inducted into both letter press and woodblock printing. I am starting a project that is lead by traditional printing methods and so this is a great start to getting me thinking of the limitations and the actual process of these methods.
We first had a go at letter press which was quite time consuming, its hard to imagine full newspapers being printed this way not to long ago. We set up a short paragraph of text in a chosen typeface and had to follow a grid system to understand the letter press trays and the order of the letters. Among all this we had to add leading plates, spaces and block up the spaces so that all lines were tight. Its really difficult to see if its successful until its actually printed. Luckily we had very few mistakes.
We had Roger there to help who was very lovely and patient with us, we managed to get things done well and picked it up quickly.
Woodblock Print
I was really excited about doing this as everyone loves playing with woodblock, don't know why but something so desirable about it, which i could have a set of full draws of them like they do.
So we started by choosing a small phrase or work (harder than you think) and simply taping any words together and mapping them out on a page. Then it was simply mixing a colour and rolling it onto the wooden letters, placing them on the beautiful Diana press and putting on your paper.
Some of the prints didn't come out fully pressed so i think this would need more padding as the press is uneven being so old. Other than that though it all went really well, we tried loads of different stocks and got some really interesting finishes.
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