Tag: letterpress

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Y turned nine at the end of May, which we celebrated with a trip to Lego House and Lego Land in Billund, Denmark as it coincided with Y having a few days off from school. But it wasn’t the only Lego related fun we organised around her birthday party. Yesterday with 5 invited friends we visited Roy Scholten‘s workshop at the Hilversum graphics center, where the group tried their hand on Lego printing.

Using flat Lego pieces you create a design, and then ink them up and put them under a press. Next to the 6 kids we were 3 parents, and we all had a lot of fun. When it was time to stop and clean up (before heading home for a small mountain of pancakes for dinner) no one really wanted to quit. I was impressed with how this little group of 8-9yr olds worked with abstract forms, experimented with colors etc, and stayed focused the full time without needing much aid or prompting.


Roy Scholten providing instructions to the group.


Searching for Lego pieces for our designs


A few iterations I made.

I originally met Roy during the pandemic in a conversation about personal knowledge management, and appreciated his bird prints made using Lego. We since acquired a few. Our friend Peter also uses a letterpress, and after making introductions, to my delight came to visit from Canada with his partner L to work with Roy. Yesterday some of their production together still adorned the walls of Roy’s atelier.


Lining up several iterations of my ‘river’ print.

You can book his workshops (and by other members of their collective) for company / team outings, or for training, as well as birthday parties. E has done a training with Roy, and we also gave her mother a workshop with friends for her 80th earlier this year. See Grafisch Atelier Hilversum’s website.


The two prints I like best. At the top one I retro actively dubbed ‘soccer player heading a ball’, that reminds me of De Zaaier by Theo van Doesburg we recently saw in the Drachten DaDa museum. Below the ‘river’, where I flipped the paper 180 degrees before printing again. The result of a much lighter blue second river course reminds me of how old river meanders stay visible as oxbow lakes in the landscape when the river bed has moved on.

Favorited The Making of “This Box is for Good” by Peter Rukavina

We received one of these lovely boxes in the mail just before New Year. Such a fantastic project, and what an enormous amount of work, over multiple weeks. Peter’s description of the iterative process and how the process leads to design choices along the way is a gift in itself.

I’m currently reading The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, which I coincidentally had sent to Peter as a gift before Christmas. In it Luca Pacioli spends a year in Paganini‘s printshop to get the Summa published, in Venice 1494. Let’s just say that several weeks is Renaissance style.

Peter and Lisa intend the boxes to be (re)filled with something and then to be given to someone else. A paying it forward process, that comes with a website to register each recipient. I’ve registered ‘our’ box, as we will soon hand it over later this week.

And, of course, every box needed to be printed with two lino blocks, one for each side. It was a process that spread out over almost two weeks.

All told, each box was printed seven times: one side each with lino-block, then four separate letterpress-printed messages on different parts of the box, and a final numbering run for the unique box numbers. …

Our hope is that boxes get received, refilled, passed on, many times; we built a little website (a Google Form, for now) to allow people to register their box number, so that we can follow their journeys around the world. …

I can say with some assurance that I have never been involved in a collaboration—artistic, logistic, design, spirit—as connected as this one was. Lisa and I can both rightfully attest that what emerged from our collaboration was something that neither of us could have arrived at individually. It was a joyful, intimate exercise in creativity. One we hope to repeat over and over.

Peter Rukavina