Book Making Skill Share

Book Making Skill share.

Invitation to a skills share on Wednesday 12th May. Liverpool based printmaker Hannah Fray is offering to share her knowledge of basic bookmaking at the Bluecoat, in
the Print Studio. This free training opportunity will run from 10 - 4pm. To book your free place email Hannah Fray at this address... hannah_fray@hotmail.com. Workshop places are limited to 6.

LEEDS 13TH CONTEMPORARY ARTIST BOOK FAIR!!!

A Cheap Affair March

Come down to Isslington Mill this Sunday for Arty goodness!! FREE ENTRY!! Myself and Hannah will be selling Prints and Artists Books - come get your mothers day presents!

There is a vegetarian cafe on site serving hot and cold food.
Stealing Sheep will be playing at around 4:30 and other music playing through out the day.

All the info about artists involved is up on the blog, 
http://cheapzine.blogspot.com/

Hope to see you there!!

A Cheap Affair!

Thanks to all those who came down to Islington Mill for A Cheap Affair on Sunday!
Was a great day meeting lots of lovely people! For those of you who were interested in buying more prints please have a look at my updated website. The fair is going to be a monthly occurrence and Im definitely going to get involved again! So hope to see you there next month!

A Cheap Affair! FREE ENTRY!

NWPs have a stall this Sunday at Islington Mill Salford 12-5pm! Run by the lovely people of Cheap Zine, there will be a wide range of crafty goodness on show! Come down and take a look, buy your valentine something special or just treat yourself to some original artwork! Plastic Palace will be providing the soundtrack for the event so bring those dancing feet and come join the partay!!

Preston Book Fair

Thanks to all of you who came and ate up some craft culture at the weekend!
NWPs had a great time! Was our first fair and although was a quiet event in general we had a lt of interest in our work and had great fun!
A few snaps of the zinefair....

HBP possE Gemma Lacey & Karen Mercer




Liverpool illustrator Phil Marsden
Hannah & Sara Stabb

Hannahs books

Hannah's delightful bird books!

Come on down to www.zinefair.com this weekend and buy some goodness!!

The Atrium, UCLAN, PR1 7BQ 10-5 Fri, 10-4 Sat

BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS!!

Happy New Year from NWPs!

We hope you had a great Christmas and New Year filled with festive cheer!!

We are back and ready to take on 2010! No rest for the printmaking wicked as we have been churning out the books for Lancashire Zine + Artists Book Fair fair next weekend! We hope to see you all there!

Heres a little sneak preview of what we will be bringing to our lovely table. I will be selling original prints in decorative presentation boxes, wax encaustic books, sketchbooks, traveling diaries (edited :) ) and much much more!

Zine Artist Book Fair

We will be having a stall at the Zine fair on the 29th and 30th January just to give you all a heads up come and spend your Christmas money from Santa on some original prints and artist books supporting local artists!

http://www.zinefair.com/

Mini Print Exhibition

We are taking part in the Mini Print Exhibition at Artlink, Hull! Check it out!

Mini Print website to come soon...

Carborundum Demonstration

Thank you to all who attended the Hot Bed Press Open Studios this weekend.
We hope are demonstration on expressive printmaking with Carborundum has inspired you in one way or another!

Four Colour Separations

This week we have been busy people with Thursday at the Bluecoat and Friday at Hot Bed Press.

Whilst Hannah got to grips with the Carborundum ready for our demo at Chapel Street Open Studios next weekend (more on this later) I gave gum arabic four colour separations a whirl. We loved the results and decided to experiment further with this and so the next day with guidance from the master of Gum Arabic Justin Sanders we both produced some amazing prints for our first trial of the process. Sometimes referred to as paper lithography, this method of printmaking uses photocopies saturated with gum arabic. The ink of the photocopy attracts the ink on the roller and can then be printed. Four Colour Seperations involves inking up the CMYK layers of an image separately then overlaying them.

We will be entering these images to the mini print exhibition in York.

Carborundum Print


Gum Arabic Four Colour Separation

Open Skill Swap: Carborundum

From Emma to Hannah to North West Printmakers

On Thursday we offered the first of hopefully many skill swapping sessions to Printmakers in the North West. The free demonstration took place at The Bluecoat Liverpool and gave an insight into Carborundum Printmaking.

We had a great afternoon experimenting with various styles of application and the participants produced some great work even with slight problems with little drying time for the varnish!







Thank you to all those that attended if you would be interested in future workshops please send us your details.

Skill Swap: Wax Encaustic

From Emma to Hannah,


This is not directly a printing technique but print is different process for print to be explored.

Encaustic Painting is using wax (beeswax) and applying it to a surface (wood) fusing it with a heating element(iron)

Using the encaustic as an adhesive a variety of materials inc thin papers such as dress patterns can be drawn/printed onto and then encased onto the surface. Other materials that work well are tissue, maps, bleached paper.



A thank you here is to Laura Deem who introduced Emma to the technique in California, USA

Skill Swap: Drypoint Card

Hannah introduced Emma to the Drypoint Card. A marval!!

The card can be scrapped/ cut/ scored into and then treated as a intaglio print.
Quick, easy and a fun material for Intaglio printing!

Skill Swap: Gum Arabic

From Hannah to Emma,

The transferring of a photocopied image using Gum Arabic solution.

Process involves applying the Gum Arabic with a sponge, rolling ink over the top, and again applying the gum Arabic.

Putting this through the press transfers the image as the Gum Arabic is drawn to the dark areas f the photocopy and so the ink attracted to the wax areas. A great technique that i will be using and developing more in the future. A four colour split of CMYK can be produced which gives fantastic results.

Another way of using the Gum Arabic is to draw an image with crayon and similar to the photocopy it is drawn to the dark areas.

Skill Swap: Copper Sulphate

Our collaborating began with skill swapping sessions between the two of us to widen our knowledge of Printmaking techniques.

Our first skill swap was from Hannah to Emma in Etching with Copper Sulphate:

Hannah clearly taught the method of the safer etching process and how to apply the various grounds

Covering Soft and Hard Resist using Graphic Chemical Water Based Block Printing Ink.



Here we have experimented with different tools including crayon, needles, pens to compare results. Using this as a hard ground was easier to see what you where drawing onto however as a soft ground it gave good faint lines.


Using Hard Resist with Lascaux. here we scrapped into the resist with a needle. The copper sulphate bit these lines well however the hard resist made it difficult to see where to draw into.


Here we used The Bluecoats answer to aquatint spraying acrylic resist with the use of an airbrush and compressor. Drawing on top of the aquatint with various materials including crayons, lard, Lascaux hard ground. Testing the copper sulphate to see how long to leave the plate etching for the tone we wanted. this plate was etched for around 10minutes.