Letterpress Chapbooks

*NEW COURSE FOR 2024*

Spend an absorbing weekend exploring letterpress printing with letterpress artist/printer David Armes. Although letterpress usually works with letterforms and texts, you don’t need to be a poet or a writer for this course!

We will use the LPW wood type collection to find letters that can be used to create symbols or patterns, enjoying their worn textures and potential for intuitive mark-making. On day two we will learn more about the rules of letterpress as we set smaller metal type and print a cover for a small chapbook to contain our prints from day one.

You will go away with a small variable edition of 10cm x 10cm sewn chapbooks, plus (hopefully) some ideas for future letterpress projects.

About the Tutor

David Armes is an artist working with print, language and geography. His work is frequently site-specific and considers how sense and experience of place can be represented. It explores the ways we describe liminal states and how landscape shapes understanding. He works primarily with letterpress printing on paper and, through using what was once an industrial process, he is interested in where the multiple meets the unique, where the ephemeral meets the archival.

David's Red Plate Press studio is based on the disputed border between West Yorkshire and Lancashire in the South Pennine hills. He travels frequently for residencies and has spent many months in the USA in the past three years working alongside contemporary letterpress practitioners, thanks to a travelling fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and a grant from the Arts Council/British Council Artists’ International Development Fund. He has recently shown work in the USA, UK, Germany and Russia, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Flourish Excellence in Printmaking award.

Leicester Print Workshop

Leicester Print Workshop is the regional development centre for printmaking. Established by artists in 1986, we are a registered charity, supported by Arts Council England. Our RIBA award-winning building is situated in Leicester City Centre's Cultural Quarter and is home to a large, well equipped open access Printmaking Studio.

We have over 30 years’ experience of teaching people printmaking. Our programme offers the largest number and broadest range of printmaking courses in the region, with courses suitable for beginners as well as experienced printmakers, delivered by practicing artists and nationally renowned tutors. Participants learn in small and friendly groups in our purpose-designed studio.

Bookings

Online: You can book online here by credit / debit card or Paypal.

Telephone: You can pay by card over the phone during our opening hours (Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm). Call us on 0116 251 4174.

In person: Call in to Leicester Print Workshop during our opening hours (Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm) to book and pay by card, cash or cheque.

Pre-course information: We will send you details of how to find us and what to bring with you when we process your booking.

Concessions

Full-Print Members of Leicester Print Workshop are entitled to a 10% discount on our inhouse courses. Interested in joining LPW as a member? Click here for more information.