arts and crafts
Le Musée de l'Imprimerie has officially earned a place on the list of My Favorite Things. First off, it is a thing of beauty.
This is the wing of the museum that has the printing studio:
This is one of the cool old printing machines inside that studio. I took a few pictures of machines, but they are all blurry because I felt self-conscious taking photos and therefore took them too quickly. Results were blurry. But you can still tell it's cool, I feel.
Secondly, the Printing Museum workshops are an excellent value. I researched places in the US to continue my book-fancying ways and they are all waaay more expensive. My guess is that this probably has something to do with being a state-funded museum. Ah, state funding for the arts, how sweet thou art! So, figuring I really should take advantage of only working part time to do more than check facebook every twenty minutes, I signed up for two more workshops. The one on text design is every Tuesday evening starting a few weeks ago until the end of the month. It's a little less awesome than I expected (mainly because I won't get to use any of those machines) but it's still cool. The day-long linoleum print-making workshop exceeded even my hyped up expectations, however!
I had a lot of fun and will hopefully be giving "linogravure" another stab next week at a non-related printing CO-OPERATIVE which I discovered at a massive BOOK FESTIVAL. Lyon is such a great city for nerds!
Here's the process leading up to the first linoleum engraving I've done in at least ten years (my mom helped me do a couple in middle school, I believe, but I mostly remember the engraving of potatoes from that period...).
Step one: come up with ambitious design which will be nearly impossible to complete with the time constraints of a day-long workshop. Draw it, trace it, flip it, trace it again on top of carbon paper on top of the linoleum to transfer an inversion of your original drawing onto the linoleum. Trace it yet again with permanent marker so you don't rub it off while you work.
check!
Carve your heart out all afternoon! Realize you will never finish if you don't sacrifice detail. Start working faster. Make some mistakes. Cut your hand a little. Work faster still. Finish enough to print it on this glorious piece of machinery.
Here is the original sketch, the finished "plaque de linogravure," a test-print I made towards the beginning (the only test print because later there was NO TIME), and the one of five prints of the finished deal.
I know what you're thinking. "Damn, that couch is glorious." Yeah, I know. Now imagine if you could see the matching floor to ceiling curtains behind it. But you can't, because that would be too much glory for one post. But you should know that it's only about the ART with me, not the drugs or the parties or the fantastic couches.
So here is my first attempt. I wish I'd had more time so that I could have fleshed it out a little and not made those random accidental scratches which you can see in a few panels, but overall I feel pretty satisfied with how it turned out, plus it was really fun to make!
I've been checking out tons of French cartoons--er, graphic novels?--from the library, so I was inspired to do a cartoon-y print instead of a single image. Can you figure out what the storyline is?
And a final picture, from the Braddy and Nickey arts and crafts hour of a couple days ago. We made postcards!
The four on the left are mine, the others are Brad's (well actually I made one of the map/train ticket ones but it counts as Brad's because I really liked his so I made one exactly the same using my old train ticket and a bike-station map instead of the metro map Brad used in his).
Happy Weekend. I'm off to go eat apple pie and play the Settlers of Catan.
This is the wing of the museum that has the printing studio:
This is one of the cool old printing machines inside that studio. I took a few pictures of machines, but they are all blurry because I felt self-conscious taking photos and therefore took them too quickly. Results were blurry. But you can still tell it's cool, I feel.
Secondly, the Printing Museum workshops are an excellent value. I researched places in the US to continue my book-fancying ways and they are all waaay more expensive. My guess is that this probably has something to do with being a state-funded museum. Ah, state funding for the arts, how sweet thou art! So, figuring I really should take advantage of only working part time to do more than check facebook every twenty minutes, I signed up for two more workshops. The one on text design is every Tuesday evening starting a few weeks ago until the end of the month. It's a little less awesome than I expected (mainly because I won't get to use any of those machines) but it's still cool. The day-long linoleum print-making workshop exceeded even my hyped up expectations, however!
I had a lot of fun and will hopefully be giving "linogravure" another stab next week at a non-related printing CO-OPERATIVE which I discovered at a massive BOOK FESTIVAL. Lyon is such a great city for nerds!
Here's the process leading up to the first linoleum engraving I've done in at least ten years (my mom helped me do a couple in middle school, I believe, but I mostly remember the engraving of potatoes from that period...).
Step one: come up with ambitious design which will be nearly impossible to complete with the time constraints of a day-long workshop. Draw it, trace it, flip it, trace it again on top of carbon paper on top of the linoleum to transfer an inversion of your original drawing onto the linoleum. Trace it yet again with permanent marker so you don't rub it off while you work.
check!
Carve your heart out all afternoon! Realize you will never finish if you don't sacrifice detail. Start working faster. Make some mistakes. Cut your hand a little. Work faster still. Finish enough to print it on this glorious piece of machinery.
Here is the original sketch, the finished "plaque de linogravure," a test-print I made towards the beginning (the only test print because later there was NO TIME), and the one of five prints of the finished deal.
I know what you're thinking. "Damn, that couch is glorious." Yeah, I know. Now imagine if you could see the matching floor to ceiling curtains behind it. But you can't, because that would be too much glory for one post. But you should know that it's only about the ART with me, not the drugs or the parties or the fantastic couches.
So here is my first attempt. I wish I'd had more time so that I could have fleshed it out a little and not made those random accidental scratches which you can see in a few panels, but overall I feel pretty satisfied with how it turned out, plus it was really fun to make!
I've been checking out tons of French cartoons--er, graphic novels?--from the library, so I was inspired to do a cartoon-y print instead of a single image. Can you figure out what the storyline is?
And a final picture, from the Braddy and Nickey arts and crafts hour of a couple days ago. We made postcards!
The four on the left are mine, the others are Brad's (well actually I made one of the map/train ticket ones but it counts as Brad's because I really liked his so I made one exactly the same using my old train ticket and a bike-station map instead of the metro map Brad used in his).
Happy Weekend. I'm off to go eat apple pie and play the Settlers of Catan.