Next week our course has a stall at the Arts Market at LCC to help raise money for our degree show. Me and a course-mate, Alex Prior, have been talking about making our own wooden printing type (possibly as part of Unit 14, possibly just for shits and giggles) for a short while now, so physically making type has been on my mind quite a bit recently. We had the idea of printing typographic greetings cards and posters, made to order to sell at our stall over the course of the market using type we made ourselves. Since time was against us, we decided to make our letters out of potatos since they are soft and easy to cut and we wanted to make all 26 letters, something that would take too long if we used card, wood or lino. We also managed to recruit another course-mate David Weller to help out. So yesterday me and Alex made the journey from Hackney to David's place in Camberwell to start work on the CSM Potato Print Press.
Since none of us are experienced type-cutters we decided to base our potato type on old wooden type letterforms for their charmingly naive shape and character. We made all 26 letters in several typefaces then decided to print some sample cards to get the ball rolling. Also...we're worried that the potatos won't last very long, so we wanted to get some items together that we can still sell if the potatoes don't make it past the weekend. Mother's Day is next weekend, hence all the 'Mum' cards.
The market opens tomorrow, and we think that printing the cards to order may be a bit ambitious, so perhaps we'll just make some more 'M's & 'U's and print a bunch more Mother's Day cards, depending on how well they sell.
A Flickr set of all the pictures I took on Saturday is here, and I'll get some shots from the Arts Market on tuesday. Fingers crossed the CSM Potato Print Press will live for more than a week!
No comments:
Post a Comment