Thought Fox
'the page is printed'
Monday, 16 December 2013
Winter cards on Etsy
Monday, 18 November 2013
Winter cards
I also found a reindeer lino block lurking in my old lino cuts and since it fits the theme I printed a few of those too. It just goes to show it's an idea I've had in my mind for a while. And I watched blackbirds gorging on the berries on the whitebeam tree in my garden and put one on a card, as a change from moonlit nights.
The cards are printed on pre-folded deckle edged Zerkell so have a quality feel about them, and of course they are hand printed using my little book press. If you are interested in buying my cards then email me at ruth0atkinson@yahoo.co.uk and I'll get back to you. I can send more photos too if you want to see more.
Friday, 24 February 2012
On the Print Face
I’ve been working on a linocut to illustrate a Summer Sonnet I worked on with Linda Cracknell and others about Dun Coillich (featured on my other blog, ruthatkinsontakingacloserlook.blogspot.com a couple of weeks ago). The plan is to print an edition on a proper press and sell it to help raise funds for the Highland Perthshire Communities Land Trust, who own and manage Dun Coillich.
I went to Quarto Press in Coupar Angus and John Easson gave me a hand printing them on his little proofing press. It took a while to get a feel for the press but once I did it was reasonably quick to print off over 100 copies of the border design. The border was printed in green and the landscape image I’d cut to illustrate the poem was to be in black. So once the border was done we had to line up the new lino block, ink up the rollers in black and start the whole printing process again. It took the best part of a day to print the two lino blocks in the two colours and then John will print the text, going through the whole process again for all 100 copies. And, even for a sonnet of fourteen lines, it still would take more type than John had available in the font I wanted to use so he would have to print the text in two goes to get the whole poem.
What we were doing was the way everything was printed until fairly recently. Colours were printed separately, type was set and someone had to make sure each piece of paper went through the press properly. It doesn’t take for ever but it does take time and a lot more effort and planning than pressing a button and it needs a bit of explanation for people to appreciate what they might be buying.
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Doodling
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Press Here
See www.coupar-angus.org/Groupshtm/presshere.htm
I’m planning to produce an edition of prints combining a poem with a linocut illustration and I wanted to talk to John about how to do it. I want the text to be printed ‘properly’ with type and through a press. John took me through his font book so I could choose the right font to suit my work. He has an impressive collection of fonts but you need a lot of type to set a page of text, not to mention all the spacers and packing that ensures the text sits in the right place on the page.
All those type trays take up space, if you can get them, which is not so easy nowadays. I guess there are still old printers with sheds full of type and type bits but there aren’t as many as there were. Ebay has done its bit to create a market but you can’t predict what’ll come up, or how much it’ll cost. Specialist makers of all the fiddly bits traditional typesetting needs are a rare breed now and there are so many bits that it’s probably impossible to get everything now. It’s sad to see such an important industry die so completely but, as John pointed out, it’s all those fiddly bits and specialised, often tedious, jobs that have helped kill it. John told me about someone he knew in Coupar Angus who’d spent a career setting up lines for accounts ledgers. There must be plenty of former printers who don’t have much nostalgia for jobs like that. Modern letterpress may be printed in the old way with inked blocks in a press but the blocks can be cast from computer generated designs. In that way the need for fiddling about with all those bits is much reduced. But some fiddly work is fine if you like that sort of thing. Thankfully for me, John is happy to typeset my fourteen lines of poetry, so I can go back to Coupar Angus and print my linocut, once I’ve cut it.