setting free the bears

so, i don't know if anyone is going to be interested in this post, but today i went on a trip to a print studio with my art class. myself & a few friends arrived early for meeting our teacher & the rest of the class (try an hour early!) so we wandered around & took pictures in the frankly beautiful surroundings. it wasn't traditional beauty, but there was a picturesque quality to the rough buildings & incredibly arty street grafitti.

i took loaaaaaaads of pictures, but here a couple of my favourites.

one of many owls dotted around the place.

"anarkiki" the bear, his necklace says "fuck the pigs" - i must admit this made me laugh

a laughing fox about to eat a rooster

i love this picture's incompleteness, i think it must be some kind of local protest group poster.

one of a few interesting silhouettes dotted around the buildings.

i adore this so much! i even skipped around a truck to take this photo.

moving on to the actual printingness of today;

me rolling out the wax onto the printing plate - this was to coat the plate so that we could scratch our design onto the surface.

me scratching my design onto the zinc plate.

the plate coated in blue ink, we had to scrape it right into the grooves which was extremely tough work. i have honestly never used so much elbow grease in my life!

then we ran it through the press!

sorry for the hugely image heavy post, but i wanted to keep a record of my awesome, ink-covered, arty, tiring yet wonderful day.