South Bank Arts Trail - free printing demos @ El Rincon Spanish Bar

Eightfivepress printing demos

Discover the wonderful world of traditional letterpress printing

As part of the Southbank Arts Trail, Bristol I’ll be heading over to El Rincon Spanish Bar with my adana 8 x 5.  I’ll be giving free demos on how to set type on the 1950’s table top printing press and there'll be some printed goodies to take away on the day! : ))

"PRINT, v.t. to impress, to imprint; to mark by pressure; to fix deeply, as in the memory; to stamp with coloured patterns. v.i. to practice the art of typography; to prepare and publish a book. n.a. mark made by impression; printed letters; the impression of types; a printed fabric, an engraving. n. Print’er." from Rapid Printing Made Easy - a Handbook for Users of the New Adana High Speed Printing Machine.

Saturday 14th May 12-4pm

El Rincon Spanish Bar

298 North Street

Bristol

BS3 1JU

Linocut Workshop - Springing into Nature

Lovely morning workshop with Zoe and Clair carving and printing their lino into a beautiful bird and a leaf. Spring is definitely on its way! : ))

Zoe and Clair chose grey / blue linseed oil based ink to print their carved blocks on different coloured card. Lovely to see how the different colour backgrounds affect the colour and mood of the images.     

Next Workshop

Rubber stamp workshop @ Salt Cafe

16th May 2017

10am - 12pm

£25

Maximum 6 participants

An introductory workshop for anyone wanting to have a go at rubber-stamping and hands-on printing. The opportunity to make time and space to create your very own personalised hand carved stamp and hand stamped mini journal. 

An Artist’s Date with Adela Breton

Celebrating Easter Sunday with a walk around Bristol in the sunshine. I usually travel everywhere by bike so today I decided to slow down and just walk. I stopped and looked at things a little more closely than usual. The bees in the flowers. The ripples on the water from boats passing. Signs on buildings I’ve never seen before. Dogs walking their people! It was a quiet Sunday but I still managed to bump into a familiar face and we walked together. We walked and talked along the docks and parted as we reached the centre of town. I made my way to Bristol Museum to see their latest exhibition.

Adela Breton: Ancient Mexico in Colour

In the late 1800’s, archeological artist and adventurer, Adela Breton, travelled around Mexico with her guide Pablo Solorio making copies of the wall paintings in temples in Chichén Itzá, Teotihuacan and Acancéh. She painted the copies with watercolours which still hold their vibrancy today as the original wall paintings begin to fade over time. 

"Adela Breton always carried a sketchbook with her, giving a 'diary' of her travels. This one has sketches of landscapes, flowers and ruins of Mexico and Canada. It includes sketches made on her climb up the volcano of Iztaccihuatl, in snow and across glaciers, up to 15,000 feet above sea level - Adela Breton also carried a notebook at all times, and made notes of lectures, objects she saw in museums, and books she read." Bristol Museum

I was especially drawn to Adela’s sketchbooks of the places she visited on her travels. I have kept sketchbooks for many years and am mostly inspired to draw when I’m travelling and sitting in cafes. In the last couple of years I've been sketching antique netsuke from museums to make a collection of mini woodblock prints. Today after walking in the sunshine and looking through the sketchbooks of Adela Breton, I was eager to sit down, open my own sketchbook and take in my surroundings. The cafe where I was having lunch was the perfect spot. 

When I finished my lunch and my sketch, I walked home remembering the paragraph from Julia Cameron’s book Walking in this World.

“Walking and talking humanize my life, draw it to an ancient and comforting scale. We live as we move, a step at a time, and there is something in gentle walking that reminds me of how I must live if I am to savour this life that I have been given.” Julia Cameron

Clockwise from top left: Landscape from Adela Breton's sketchbook. Landscape from Adela Breton's sketchbook. Adela Breton's notebook of the Maya calendar. All three from Bristol Museum. A sketch I made today at Pinkman's Bakery, Bristol. 

Hot off the 8 x 5 press!

Enjoying printing on my Adana 8x 5 again. It’s been a while as the last few months I’ve spent most of my energy developing my new website. So with a new website I thought it was time to make some freshly printed business cards.

eightfivepress - woodblock letterpress linocut

Typeset with Univers lead type. Printed with grey /blue linseed oil based ink.

I printed these while listening to the wonderful Debbie Millman (designmatters) in conversation with writer and adventurer Caroline Paul. 

"Debbie Millman is a is a writer, educator, artist, brand consultant and host of the radio show Design Matters”.

Debbie interviews artists, writers, educators, designers, musicians, poets, film makers, bloggers including Seth Godin,  Alain de Botton, Eileen Myles, Tim Ferriss, Alison Bechdel, Krista Tippett, Maira Kalman, Oliver Jeffers, and many many more. 

"And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both." — Debbie Millman

To the moon and back and second hand books

Bloom and Curll bookshop, Bristol

Thank you Lilla Duignan at seeingthings for your inspiring blog post last week including a link to Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project via Brain Pickings. Over the weekend I made a trip to a few second hand bookshops in Bristol. The last shop I popped into was Bloom and Curll who's shelves were filled with delightful books beautifully arranged in colourful patterns. Jason had just received a huge pile of books about Japan, particularly Kyoto and quite a few children's stories written in Japanese and English. So here's my contribution to a kind of - sort of- sorted books!

Japanese books from Bloom and Curll

Perfect timing to stumble upon these books as I have been slowly learning Kanji for a little while now and have predicted, from how long it has taken me so far, it will be at least 6 or 7 years to complete the online course! (https://www.wanikani.com) And that's just Kanji with a bit of vocabulary. (It's supposed to take about 1 or 2 years.) These books might help to speed things up as I've imagined half way through the course I will have forgotten everything from the beginning so it could well be another 6 or 7 years to refresh my memory and then I may have forgotten the second half once I've remembered the first half so another 6 or 7 years on top of that! So in about 20 years (possible light years) I may have grasped a small bit of Kanji and tiny bit of Japanese vocabulary and even made a trip to the moon!

Luke Jerram's Moon at Bristol University