Letterpress Student Work: January 2020

Kicked off the year with a short four week Introduction to Letterpress. It was a small class, but they packed a big punch! Everyone in the class got along beautifully with each other and we had musicals playing each week. We started the class by making a fun sentence in week one and kept the ball rolling.

The whole group had listened to the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America” over the holidays so we were all really excited to see this piece come to life! Mixing the color pink was fun and fitting.

The second week of class each student began working heavily on very different projects. We had little type and large type spread out around the room. It was a mess trying to help everyone work.

One of my students went home after the first class and came up with a family motto with his wife. He brought in some large poster sized paper to print on. I thought the collection of phrases they generated was beautifully curated. To get this piece to print appropriately, we had to lock it up on the bed of the press itself instead of inside a galley.

While the large type was on the Challenge press, I worked with another student setting these coasters and printing them on the tiny Kelsey. She bust through all 100 in under 30 minutes. The quote by Brené Brown reads, “Strong back. Soft front. Wild heart.”

The same student that made the large family motto poster also printed this ombre wood type. BIDASO stands for “Burn it down and start over!” How clever is that? I took one of these postcards to a developer at work. It feels like my entire job somedays is just burning things to the ground.

On the last night of class, everyone worked hard at finalizing last minute projects. Can you catch the hidden misspelling in this print? It was done on purpose, don’t worry.

And I just loved this. Permission to be wrong is a great thing to have!