A foray into the wonderful world of woodblock here, using a vintage press and an assortment of chunky wooden type.
I love the look of woodblock type. This trad printing technique was disappearing, with printers throwing out drawers of the stuff when newer techniques took over. Luckily, some folks collected up what they could, and I got to use some blocks that had been saved from the skip, with a heavy duty press to run them through, as well as the rest of the strangely named kit: quoins, chases, reglets etc.
With a bit of careful arranging, test printing, padding, printing again, tweaking and printing again on various kinds of paper, I got the kind of result that would be hard to replicate with digital techniques alone. But talk about time-consuming - phew! It took me about 4 evenings of messing around to get something I could use. No wonder wood is out, and pixels are in.
With a bit of careful arranging, test printing, padding, printing again, tweaking and printing again on various kinds of paper, I got the kind of result that would be hard to replicate with digital techniques alone. But talk about time-consuming - phew! It took me about 4 evenings of messing around to get something I could use. No wonder wood is out, and pixels are in.
The prints above are some of these experiments. In the end, good old newsprint got the best result from this set-up, as due to the slightly uneven heights of some of the letters in this very old set, thicker paper didn't make enough contact with some of the blocks to make an even print. I played around with different graphics, including the swami and cobra idea above (another good 1950s film cliché), before settling on an advertising character from a restaurant chain and some hand lettering to digitally complete the poster.
Just look at the end-grain on those letters. Mmmmm.
Below is part of the set of type used in this poster, which is probably twice as old as I am.
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