Looking into Letterpress with Carolyn Fraser - Art Prints

Today Carolyn shows  us some of the letterpress art prints that have recently captured her attention. If this weeks Guest Blog has increased your interest in trying your hand at letterpress, remember that Carolyn also runs bi-monthly letterpress classes- you check out all the details here. -Jenny x

My day job is in Preservation at the State Library of Victoria, which means I spend quite a bit of browsing time in the Readings shop just off the foyer. Recently, I was pleased to find a letterpress-printed Abecedarium of Melbourne images, designed by Benjamin Puckering.

Benjamin Puckering's The Illustrated A-Z of Melbourne. Close up of the print below.

Available at Readings or online at The Design Kids.

I was pleased to discover that it was printed by Wayne Davis at The Artisan Press in Byron Bay. If you are a regular reader of Inside Out magazine, you will have seen Wayne's work already. He produced this beautiful poster by Tracy Lines for the magazine.

The Hungry Workshop also produce limited edition prints. Look at their gorgeous contribution to Stop Flooding My Record Collection, a benefit organised to raise money for the Queensland flood relief.

The Hungry Workshop's fundraiser print- see a video of them being printed here.

Here's their description of the project: With a little help from a friend (and many prototypes), we laser cut a vinyl record which we then mounted onto a wooden block. We used this as a plate to print 180 limited edition prints. Each sheet was hand fed on a Chandler & Price Hand Platen (built sometime in the mid 1800s), with half printed in neon orange ink and the other half in neon pink. The resulting prints are a bit rough around the edges but we managed to create an impression that captures both the grooves in the record and our laser cut design.