Stuff What We Made (Adana Workshop Part 2)

Further to my effusing yesterday, here are some more pics from our fantastic letterpress workshop at St Brides.

After the theoretic preliminaries, we moved on to setting up the Adana for print. The first thing we discovered is we have been using waaaayy too much packing on the platen at home, you generally only need around a millimetre.Whoops.

The next genius tip from Richard was using a slip of paper pulled between the platen and the locked-up type, to determine when the screws are correctly set. You should be able to pull the paper out without tearing, but it also should not fall if you let it go. This is probably the most useful thing I have learned all year.

Once we had the basic set up sorted, we got to try our hands at preparing various things for print...

Here are our attempts at lino-cutting. We only spent about 15 mins on these, and I must confess I am overwhelmed by how not-crap mine is...! I have no drawing, painting, or really any artistic skills of any kind. I thought I was going to have to go and hide in the cupboard when Richard said were going to do some lino-cutting, save myself the inevitable embarrassment. So I'm really very pleased with how this turned out...

Here's my little rabbit:

And printed:

Samuel went for a chair (of course!):

And here it is printed:

These were actually printed on a galley proof press, hence the lovely strong blacks. It wouldn't be impossible to get this result on an Adana, but it would take a whole lotta make-ready and fiddling about!

Next lesson was a bit of type-setting.

We each chose a short quote and used a proper composing stick (uh-huh, get me and my lingo) to set the type. The traditional lay-out of a type tray makes very little sense to the layman's eye. It is based on letter frequency, and I'm sure if you're a pro, it's all good, but for us rookies it was excruciatingly slow. Once you settle into a rhythm though, it's surprisingly relaxing. I could definitely do more of this, and as with everything, I'm sure practice makes perfect.

I elected to print a quote from one of my very favourite films: Wes Andersen's Grand Budapest Hotel:

Just pretend you haven't noticed the upside-down letter s's. I'm fuming!

Samuel went with some 90s rap lyrics, because you know, why not. I love the contrast of style and content here:

So these are the main things we came away with after our fascinating day, but in terms of knowledge gained, I've barely scratched the surface here. We've so much more still to learn though, and we're raring to go! I've gone back to work/reality very begrudgingly this week; I want to be at home printing!