BA (Hons) Graphic DesignGraphic DesignPrintmakingTypographyUniversityUniversity of LincolnFresh cuts from underneath the cleaver…

Well, I mean squeegee. You might remember, Tuesday was P day – Print day! I booked into the print room to produce my final 6 limited edition posters

After 8 hours of light box tracing and scalpal-ing, I had templates for the 2nd (black), 3rd (blue) and 4th (grey) colours of my poster. I had to hand cut my stencils because I wasn’t able to silk screen print due to the massive volume of 2nd years printing…

… but I was able to use the suction table to help with the registration of my layers…

… not that it really helped me! My stencil got stuck to the plastic sheet and so I had to peel off all the components and re-arrange them in the same place! I was pretty stressed out at this point…

… and it didn’t help that when I had re-arranged all of the pieces again and printed, some things went a bit skew whiff 🙁

The ‘T’ in student and the outline of the ribbon on the right hand side both moved out of place. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so when I had realised they had moved I was disappointed. Cue the wise words of Jack… ‘that’s the beauty of printmaking’

By this point I had arranged my stencil, printed, failed, panicked, re-arranged my stencil, printed again and come to the end of my booked session! STRESS! Luckily, I was able to snap up Sunjay’s place on Thursday to get the rest printed…

A first glimpse of the blue..

… and I’m happy with that! Thursday went a lot more smoothly.

The alignment is a bit off on some of them, but with 12 posters to choose my final 6 from, I’m not too worried. The final touch now…

… a light grey to outline the meat, add a crease to the ribbon and text to the star:

Just add experience… and I can do it!

Ta-dah! 1 of the final 12 prints (that I still need to trim)… and I promise I’m not a mannequin even though I’m in the same pose and area of the print room.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the final outcome. I wish I’d been able to use silkscreen instead of a stencil because all my text would be in the right place but I think my poster still has the impact I wanted.

So, what do you think? Don’t be shy… I don’t have access to a cleaver, promise! 🙂