Friday 31 January 2014

Fruit Number 1

Triggered by finding this block (roughly 3cm square) in the archives of a printing business that thrived in Byker, I remembered the coloured tissue paper that fruit used to be wrapped in.


I had also just visited the Matisse paper-cuts exhibition, Drawing with Scissors at Stroud Museum, where I saw the lithographic print of his 1953 Nu aux Oranges.


This gave me the idea to make a letterpress fruit salad, starting with this reference to Jeanette Winterson's 1985 book.


The circle between the type is a digital print on coated archival 300gsm photographic paper which takes up the letterpress ink really well. The intention was that the circle sit centred with the type, but having messed up on the first attempt, I decided to make a print with the circle off-centre. This gave the happy accident of the top of the t just touching the bottom of the fruit & the dot on the i making the stalk mark. More fruit to come...

Saturday 18 January 2014

Printing Colour

The project is to print & play with the word "colour" using large wooden type. The largest letters (C & U) are about 38 cm tall. I don't have complete alphabets.


Once I've decided which size to use, I will draw the missing letters at the required size in Illustrator for use with a laser-cutter.
Wooden type was traditionally made from end-grain maple. I will need to decide whether to use wood (other than maple), MDF, lino or another material.
For printing, the beds of the 2 Vandercook proofing presses at UWE are too small to print the whole word. I can get 3 letters at a time on a Colombian press bed, or I could hand-burnish the letters.
I can split the word into 2 lines:
COL
OUR
I want to print on the same large sheet of paper, so need to investigate the largest paper sizes, or experiment with joining sheets together by sewing or folding (rather than just sticking).