Letterpress Gig Posters

Thin Ice Press is running a letterpress printing workshop on Sunday 26 July, from 11:00 to 16:30, where you'll design and print your own one-of-a-kind gig poster. It's a hands-on session, so you'll be doing the work yourself rather than watching from the side.

The morning and afternoon are built around a few specific techniques. You'll work with wood type, setting your text by hand from a drawer of physical letters, and you'll use split-fountain inking, which is when you put two or more colours of ink on the roller at once so they blend into a gradient across the page. By the time you're finished, you'll have a printed poster to take home.

It's worth knowing where this sits. Thin Ice Press is the York Centre for Print, directed by Professor Helen Smith. It's a hub for printmaking in the city, offering memberships, workshops, equipment hire, events, and exhibition space. The centre focuses on traditional printmaking and bookbinding, with workshops covering letterpress, linocut, risograph, drypoint, and Japanese bookbinding. This gig poster session is one of those, so you're working in a place that does this all day.

The workshop runs from 11:00 to 16:30 on Sunday 26 July at Thin Ice Press, York.