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Posters and prints from wood and metal type, linocuts, and polyester lithography plates

Long, long ago, I went to a school where the cruel teachers saved money by persuading some of the pupils to print things like programmes for plays and sports-days on a tabletop letterpress. That was when I learned about ems and ens, quads and spaces, shooting-sticks and thermography: entrancing names for messy activities that nevertheless produced many useful items of stationery; and my spelling came on a lot, too, not to mention my ability to read mirror-image text. (It's not a skill you seem to be able to get rid of, and it's not helpful when you come across a glass door that says PUSH on the other side. And, of course, push.)

Fast-forward to a brief affair with painting. Sometimes I actually sold my pictures too, but I never liked seeing them going out of the door for ever. So, back to multiples!

I use a proofing press, which will print letterpress, magnesium blocks and linocuts, and a weird and wonderful flatbed offset lithography press, designed to print from ball-grained zinc plates.

Yes, offset litho is the process that virtually all commercial printers use these days: but my flatbed is a quite different sort of beast from their fully automated monsters. For a start, you draw directly on the plate. Then, to make a print, you wet the plate with a damp cloth (and if you forget that, it's wrecked), apply the ink using a brayer, and then wind a handle which rolls a rubber roller along to transfer just one inky image from the plate to a piece of paper. Then wind the roller back and start again. This is SLOW, but it also provides all sorts of opportunities....

Zinc plates are expensive and cumbersome, so I use polyester plates. You can also make offset prints from lino. (Thus, since letterpress reverses the image and offset printing doesn't, it's possible to produce both a right- and a mirror-image from the same linocut -- if that were ever useful.)

I'm putting up a few of my recent letterpress posters to see how they do on Folksy. Then we will see.

The final thing you need to know is that, alas, I am not the entrancing green colour depicted in my shop photo: but all the same it is me (and not Shrek), in a rare self-portrait that was part of a larger picture.