Letterpress Valentines, with Ted Ollier

Letterpress Valentines Workshop, with Ted Ollier 

at Reflex Letterpress, 523 Medford St, Charlestown (THIS IS AN OFFSITE EVENT) 

Celebrate the love in your life, with a valentine, galentine, or pal-entine letterpress card!

This workshop is a warm up for letterpress, where you'll learn the basics of creating with type! Attendees will learn type composition with real lead letters; proper lead form setup and page layout; how to set up, use and clean a Vandercook proofing press; and more. The focus will be on technical skill with an eye for producing a beautiful result. Attendees will also learn some of the history of letterpress printing, the current renaissance in letterpress, and how the instructor came to work with letterpress. All attendees will leave with at least 2 handmade letterpress cards.

About the instructor: Ted Ollier has been dealing with design and printing since about 1995. He has been working with digital layouts from Aldus Pagemaker to Quark XPress to Adobe InDesign to Affinty Designer. He has dealt with standalone RIPs to imagesetters to ferric etchings to transparency masks. He has designed fonts, business cards, wedding invitations, CD covers, trifold brochures and curriculum booklets. He was trained as a traditional printmaker — intaglio, relief, silkscreen and lithography — at Texas State University and Massachusetts College of Art. He has been teaching letterpress since 2008 at the Bow & Arrow Press and Arbalest Press. He can pretty much set you up with what you need to get something printed.

He is also a conceptual artist, and you can view his artwork at Mindhue Studio. He lives in Medford, Massachusetts, with a patent attorney, a brand-new human, a red tabby and a fluffy chow-mix.

Directions to Reflex Letterpress: 

Reflex Letterpress is located at 523 Medford Street, Charlestown, MA, in the Stove Factory building, adjacent to the Schraft building.

By Public Transit: 92 or 93 bus to the Schraft complex; Orange Line T to Sullivan Square station.

Parking is available on Medford Street.