The Letterpress Workshop

Exploring the letterpress studio.......

On Thursday, I had my first ever letterpress workshop, which I really enjoyed. As we were waiting for the teacher, I looked around the studio and took some photos.

In the beginning of the workshop, we were told about different letterpress terminologies. The letterpress works to a system, it's basically based around point system. In the workshop we learned about the basics of hand typesetting; the case lays and parts of a letter and how to lay the letters correctly to print them and what spacings and leadings to use in order to get proportionate print.

So after a bit of introduction, we managed to set our full names in 12point Baskerville u/lc range left on an 18 pica measure; which I think was a good start to letter printing. After we all had set our names, all of them were then put together using the point system in order for them to be printed.

We were then introduced to the use of proofing press.

We all had a go and proof printed the names that we had set up, I really enjoyed doing the whole thing and it printed pretty well, although somehow my surname spelt Siddip instead if Siddiq. I am not sure how that happened, may be I had put a p instead of a q.
So after printing our names, we were then put into three groups and each group was given one colour for which we have come up with something that reflects the meaning of that colour which can be a quotation or part of a song and with that we will be making a poster. So rather than putting everything onto next week, we set a few sentences to go onto out poster before finishing the days workshop so that we have them ready for next week. The workshop went quite well, I am glad that i learned a totally new thing, but there's still loads more to learn about it, so i am looking forward to the next week's workshop.