Printing at the Bluecoat

As decided upon last Monday we decided to meet up this morning as a group for a session in the Screen Printing studio along with Mike and Lucy (two other volunteers) to share ideas and experiment with design proposals for the poster I suggested we put together to advertise the Bluecoats workshops and courses that are available to the public. As I was aware Hannah Fray was leaving us all the information the school wanted incorporated on the poster and maybe a few design ideas or examples to give us a little idea of what was expected. But upon arrival we came to realise that we were putting this together ourselves from scratch with just the suggestion that we incorporated the Bluecoat logos to advertise the building professionally; these were available for us on the desktop computer.

After slight confusion we began considering many possible ideas which came with a mixture of different opinions and responses from one another but settled upon an idea to get us started. We wanted the 'print making' to have a major input in the design as that is what we are aiming to advertise and so we decided to use the print making facilities for the majority of the poster, keeping the template relatively simple but using a repetitive and layering process to express the equipment available on the courses. I designed the templates for us all to use which was transferred onto a screen...following the process we was previously shown in training; and began printing using brightly mixed colours to grab the viewers attention. The text, fonts and logos would be added in black using computer printing and hand drawing at a later date.

However after experimenting with these numerous prints; overlaying and repeating the process we decided that the idea wasn't working as we would have liked as we didn't have the equipment and materials for the ink to sit well on the page; giving that professional finish. Therefore we decided to scrap this initial idea and start again from scratch, thinking of other ways in which a similar affect could be achieved. At that point ideas wasn't particularly flowing and so we decided to go away and individually put together a few ideas to compare the following week. I personally like the idea of incorporating photography with the print; maybe taking an image of the print making room; showing the facilities provided and transferring that image onto a screen to be printed faintly, preferably monochrome with the text and logos of the Bluecoat added on top. I will put together a moc-up idea of my proposal ready for the group on Monday.