Life’s but a walking shadow
Inasmuch as I’m temporarily not suited to doing much standing or walking, I went for the simplest possible design of a single graphic block at today’s Christmas Card Workshop with Mary Plunkett at the National Print Museum. The tall-but-narrow bucolic winter scene block that I was sure was available turned out to be a figment of my imagination, so I went for some Celtic knotwork and made a rather more general-purpose card:
Inasmuch as I’m still catching up with blog posts that I would have written, here’s last year’s Christmas card from the Christmas Card workshop at the National Print Museum. ‘Nollaig Shona (D[h]uit)’ means ‘Happy Christmas (to you)’ in Irish. I’d used ‘Nollaig Shona’ and ‘Merry Christmas’ on the same card before, but this time I thought to put each in a different orientation so that only one is easily readable at any one time and the other, if you don’t pay too much attention to it, can look like decoration.
Inasmuch as this blog was off-stage all that year, here’s the Christmas card that I printed at the National Print Museum in 2017. I was lucky enough that it was picked as the card that the Museum sent as their Christmas card that year.
Inasmuch as there was spare time before I got a turn on the press at the Introductory Letterpress Course at NCAD with Mary Plunkett to print my definition of tea, I also set these two lines from Hamlet:
Inasmuch as I’d missed too many sessions to complete what I’d set out to do in the Introductory Letterpress Course at NCAD with Mary Plunkett, I instead made this concoction:
Inasmuch as I have no affinity for it, I took until this year’s Christmas Card Workshop at the National Print Museum to first use big wooden type. Maybe I was over-compensating for previously ignoring the big type, but since the type was going to be big, I wanted it to be BIG:
The wooden type itself looks more interesting than its result:
Inasmuch as I wanted to feature the letterpress aspect of the card from this year’s Letterpress Christmas Cards Workshop at the National Print Museum, I dreamt of this:
Inasmuch as it’s a good and useful way to get hands-on experience with letterpress, I went to my third Christmas Cards Workshop at the National Print Museum earlier this month.
It was interesting to learn about letterpress printing at the National Print Museum workshop by printing a letterhead based on the letterhead I produce on the computer. I had fun; doing the 36pt “Menteith” was a doddle; the instructor, Con, was great, and very helpful when it came to letterspacing “CONSULTING”; but, boy, 8pt text takes a long time when done by hand, especially when you don’t know the layout of letters in the case. Continue reading “Impressed by Letterpress”
I was at the National Print Museum in Dublin for their open day last weekend, and I’ll be back there next weekend for a workshop on letterpress printing.