Screen Prints

To break the monotony of the letterpress prints. I have added photographs of the space I have been working at and will screen print over them.
The idea is to give a sense of space (and help the viewer connect with the surroundings I was working in) and show in some way the process involved to create the letterpress prints. Photographs includes material that I have been working on, making the imagery relevant.
The content screen printed over, gives an added layer of information that helps tie it all together.

Round 2: Test Prints

This time took some more test prints but with three different kinds of stock. Took about half a day to get seven different 'pieces' printed.

The stock was bought from Fedrigoni. The three different types of stocks I tried were:

• Old Mill Banco 250gsm
• Century Cotton Laid 280 gsm
• Splendorgel Avorio 300gsm

These are some of the test print that I took. Rather happy with some of the results. Fine tuning will be done during the final prints. Legibility cannot be compromised.


But as Alan Kitching said "Print wasn't meant be perfect".

It looks like a walk in the park to put these compositions together, but it takes forever. And when you are looking at tiny alphabets, you don't realise when you wrote "thingi" instead of thing. The original composition has now been corrected.

 Tables are perhaps some of the most time consuming compositions to make in letterpress. You have to actually calculate and think in points to get accurate positioning in the table.

 Large body of text with justification seems so simple on a computer, but doing this manually for every line definitely gave me new found respect for justification. Especially, when I had to reset the text a second time after the printer dropped it while setting it in the chase for the first round of test prints.

 Just a fun composition that was made using old blocks. Some of these haven't been used for years. Some of the blocks were made of lead and wood and some were the newer polymer blocks.

 Tried experimenting with lines of horizontal and vertical text.

 These were literally the last few pices of Kannada type that I found lying around. SO I thought I would use them in one final composition that spoke about the rate at which type is sold off as scrap metal in India.

For the Teacher..

On Monday I had some pictures clicked as a part of my artists book. These photographs have been clicked by my friend and class mate Vishnu.


This book is dedicated to Mr.Laxmikanth, the man who taught me everything during my one month of working at the printers.

Some of the images below will have captions/ quotes letterpressed (or screen-printed, depending on which medium works well). This is in hopes of tying together what sort of a place Konark Printers and give people an opportunity to visualise the work space.

 7hrs of standing, is sooo painful. You don't realise it till one leg starts hurting and then you know all your weight was on that one leg for the past 1hr. ATTENTION is the key.

                          

 
Quotations

 At the end of the day, to avoid lead poisoning.. there's a bucket of cold water and a bar of rin to wash your hands with.

Death becomes... (Content Generation)

"Letterpress in India is.. DEAD".
Sure, sounds like a bold statement. But it is pretty much the truth and rather sad one.
Today letterpress (whatever I've seen on blogs etc.) being done abroad is largely done with polymer plates. I am personally not a big fan of these polymer plates, they have moved away from the whole hands on approach. Creating art works on the computer and then printing them using a letterpress is just bastardizing the medium.
Very few people still chose to actually tediously compose type, set it and print.
And that is why once i again..i do repet myself.. Letterpress is dead. But is there hope for revival? Probably. 
In India however the future is bleak..dim...call it what you may. One of the main reasons is that the people who still do letterpress printing in India no longer find it commercially viable and for them it is a means to an end. So, if it means that they cannot make money from letterpress printing they will shift to offset printing.


With these things mine the content i have generated for my Artist Book is based on some of the things that people have said about letter press, some haikus about death.
Here are a few: 
Norb Brylski, Retired Pantograph Operator (movie: Typeface): "I am good at what I do because I am the last one. There's no one really that I can compare myself to." 
Anil Joshi, letterpress Printer Mumbai: "There were 50 printers on my street now I am the only one left." 

I have also had the opportunity to speak to Pierre Tzenkoff, Art Director who has worked for 7years on a book for luxury brand Goyard.

His insights have been amazing and a huge part of giving a small positive angel to my book. I'd like to quote a line from one of his emails. The way he writes is just as interesting as what he is talking about. 

"Letterpress is beautiful, the text is different, it has a real emotion, the blacks are very dark and the way it goes inside the paper is amazing. letterpress is an art.

I'm spending hours working on the colour of the black, how deep it goes inside the paper...and each page is different."

Content Generation - The Start

After what seemed like an eternity of moving circles and mind map after mind map, decisions have been made.

I still like the idea of working towards an artist book. This book will now deal with the "Death of Letterpress" (Yes, A rather bold statement. But, from my research that seems the case.) Some of the reasons why I think it is so would be part of this artist book. The book is to also contain quotes from interviews, design quotes, haiku's about 'the end'. The next 2 days I hope to get all of this in place.

To go with this I want to work with some of the "products" that are produced by Letterpress printers in India. Some rather "clerical" objects like bus tickets, bill books, business cards, doctor's prescriptions and numbering lottery tickets. I hope to make some "modifications" in the object/ reprint it and re-contextualize it.

There is a certain aesthetic that letterpress printing has and it seems lost esp. with the current use for letterpress. I hope these modifications will help highlight this difference and make a comment about our ever evolving times and aesthetic. Maybe people will take a closer a look and realize that the object is not what it seems to be!

Layers

After a few days of aimless wandering, I felt great sense of purpose on Sunday and started mind mapping. This technique saves my life time and again. I got down to breaking all the threads I could use for figuring out what my end product would be.


One of my inspirations is the artist book by Paolo Carraro called The Impermanent in the Permanent.


There are three versions of this book:

• The book form in bound as the traditional Japanese style in which the four quarters of a square which runs through the book are rotated by means of cut-outs, folds and colour, capitalising on a powerful left-hand, right-hand interaction.
• The book size is 21.5 by 20 cm with 16 images.
• Edition of 9 copies only, all signed by the artist.
• The slip case form is made of 4 little volumes boxed in a slip case in which each of the four rotations is contained in its own base were all the pages are unbound so that the cut-outs and folds can be re-arranged in a virtually endless discovery.

• Each booklet is made up of 4 pages of 20 by 20 cm.

After taking a look at this artist book, I started think of what could be done for my project that would help highlight Letterpress printing and make it India specific.

Some of my initial rambling:

I am now thinking.. spatial (just in terms of the product), tactile, discovering.. like finding a piece of history and taking the time to understand it.

Another mind map and then will re-listen to all my interviews to get some content or starting points out of them.

Content Generation - The Beginning

Grafica Fidalga, is a printing press in Sao Paula, Brazil. I had seen this video ages ago, before I even decided that letterpess would be my calling for my diploma project.

The work they produce is beautiful and has this lovely old world charm that fascinates me.

This some how feels like the beginning of some content generation...

Review 2 and Ground Theory

After the first round of research which included Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune I realized that all the interviews were similar in terms of content. My research did not lead to the kind of conversations I had expected. The people I spoke to were like skilled workers who did not necessarily see the “value” of this printing method in terms of design.

Also I had approached the project with the notion that letterpress is still alive in India. However this is not the case. The technique is rather dead and has been so for the past 8 to 10 years.

Content:

• Move to the product
• Figure out the who, why, when and how? It will lead you to the “what”.

• What is the point of the book?
• What does it have to say about letterpress printing? Representation?
• Is there a story?

Exploring the medium:

• Does the final product have to be a book?
• Can there be posters or “images” instead? How does one read these as compared to a body of text?
• Scale – Work with various methods of manual printing, Alternative printing methods that could be used along with letterpress
• CONTENT will lead to the end product and demand certain treatment.

Research:

• Artist books
• Letterpress books
• Letterpress artwork, Students' letterpress projects
• Ground Theory

Medium:

• What will the content of the book be?
• Is the book 'just' about letterpress? What is the 'joy of turning every page'?