OFFICIAL COUNTDOWN TO WEBSITE OPENING

So, a date's been decided on, and it's all systems go. The official date of The Printing Room going live is Friday, 3rd December, so bookmark this page now: http://www.theprintingrooms.com/


Currently, preparing the final plates for printing. There are another 12 editions to print, so it will be touch and go whether there's enough time to get every single edition up on the site, but if not on the 3rd, they'll be there over that weekend. Each edition takes the best part of a day to print, but with the website to finish and the site images to photograph, and the mounts to order, and the postage to sort, and..... well, you get the picture, 8/10 days per week would be good at this stage!


No The Printing Room images this week! I will be keeping you all in suspense for the website opening, and so all editions will be hush-hush from now. Speaking of images, am preparing and buying frames, and will be setting aside a day and a friend pre-site/pre 3rd December to show you how your limited edition print will look framed... fantastic... obviously!!


Today: blogging, carving, cutting, printing, website-making. So much for Sunday being a rest-day. Right, enough of the chat, here's some pictures I've found that have helped the creativity flow this week, enjoy!

SOME INSPIRATIONAL PICS!

part of my current noticeboard!

This week, I'll keep the writing short and show you some images that I have in my studio. I always have a very large notice board in front of my desk which I add to and change every few weeks, sometimes daily if I have lots of images to get through. I use image sources from the internet, magazines, art galleries, books (some great illustrators out there), greeting cards, wallpaper etc. You may notice a common theme... nature and animals... sometimes, when all inspiration is lost, it's nature I turn to... and even when all is won I still turn to nature.

I really love the depth and creativity of 1950's naive pattern. You can really see the influence of screen printing and over-laying in this type of pattern. 

1950s influence, geometric

And the best part is that it was that there were variations that all made sense together. So we had the rough around the edges, over-laying. We had the geometric shapes and we had child-like/simplistic/pared down design... and the start of great cartoons!

It was all a direct influence of the preceding history, and designers and artists really went for it (and musicians, and architects...). 

When you look at anything from the 1950's you really do see the influence of current-day design, especially higher end stuff - just look at some of Tom Dixon's designs - this table is like a modern, even more pared down version of Ercol.

I'll happily finish off with some more images. You'll see the geometric, the child-like/cartoon and some animals pics... Enjoy! and if anyone has any images, similar or otherwise that they find a source of inspiration, then comment away!

1950's influence - geometric shape

1950's cartoon-style

Kool Cats!

Geometric

SOME LINO-PRINTING TECHNIQUES

During Lino Turorial 1 and Lino Tutorial 2 we briefly touched on the types of different carving you can use with lino-cutting. I'm going to expand a little on that in this blog entry and show some examples of the differences you can achieve - these will be the prints you will expect to see for sale on www.theprintingrooms.com once the site is up and running (just a little plug today!).

Firstly, when you draw your image onto the lino, you can either carve that image away, or you can carve around the image. The difference, ultimately is the amount of ink that will be transferred onto the paper once you have reached the inking-up stage. The difference in the final print can be huge, however.

When you carve away the drawing only, you will be leaving a much bigger area of the plate on which to hold the ink, giving a much larger 'background' area - we really favour this approach, as rather then getting caught up in the carving away of a large space, what you can achieve is a really free and energetic drawing. If we take the 'Flamingo' as an example, the outline was drawn onto the lino-plate first, and then we worked back into the plate with smaller amounts of detail - as this wasn't drawn in, it meant that each cut was done in quite an energetic manner, and we think this comes across in the end product. To have the larger ink area in the colour that we mixed also gives quite a nice shock of colour!

Now to focus on the 2nd technique that we have mentioned. For the 'Jungle' Series, we have carved around the image, and so there is a very different quality achieved. The image we have chosen is 'Elephant Stack'. Again, the outlines were drawn onto the lino-plate, but instead of carving the outline, we worked into the background and carved away anything that wasn't drawn on the plate, therefore leaving quite a bit of background on view. It is a much more work-intensive approach, but the end-product defines this. For the 'Jungle' series, we wanted a much more naive approach and look and we think that this was achieved. There are other techniques that can be used for lino, for example it can be etched - Keep watching our blog for new entries!