I had the privilege of using Flower City Art's Letterpress for my creative writing class on Wednesday; we're making a class magazine! We're making them by hand, and we needed to print covers. It was a lot of fun to figure out the design by hand, and make the press work it's magic. We printed all 135, although we only need 100, in an hour and a half. We got a tour of the studio as well.
Here's a video of the press;
The purple is where the ink is, and you can see the stamps on the tray. Then the press pushes the paper onto the stamps, which get inked by the press. This is a proofing press, which would be used to make mock-up of what needed to be printed before it hit a larger press to mass produce copies. Here are the stamps;
Since the title of our magazine is "Ink Storm," we wanted to have something storm-like, but not too aggressive. My classmates had lots of ideas, thinking about the words being in a cloud, and raindrops- but I'd seen print presses before, and knew it wasn't gonna be that detailed. So we ended up with a moon, some stars, "Ink Storm" with a lightning bolt as the space, and this flourish, which is meant to symbolize a gust of wind. The wind carries over from the front and back of the page. Here's how the covers look;
I think, based on what space and tools we had, it's really good. I'm very glad we have the stars, I had wanted the title "Stellar Ink," but "Ink Storm" was chosen. The stars still allow for the star theme. I don't have much more to say about it, besides that I had so much fun.
And that I hate driving in the city.
Here's some pictures of me at the press!
Well, that's all from me!
Have a great day,
Rosetta 💖