I chose to reply to Emily MacDougall’s post on Potato Printing seen here.
Unlike Emily, in this task, I chose to complete this task using pencil and paper, so I’m glad to see someone do the opposite and compare our experiences. Something I really appreciated about Emily’s text is her sharing how long it took to complete this task. When I initially saw the option to make potato letters, I thought it would be too time-consuming, and I’m impressed she got it done in 40 minutes. I could foresee this taking me a few hours. Her strategy in choosing letters with straight lines was an advantage, especially when she realized that they should have been printed backward. This is another consideration I didn’t take into account when considering what task to complete. The backward letters, I think, is an excellent form of editing in this type of medium. Although it would take longer to change a letter such as G, like Emily suggested, understanding why that process would take longer is important.
After watching Cooke’s (2012) short film, “Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film,” I was able to better understand how tedious this process is. Seeing how each letter needed to be placed precisely for a piece of text to come out the way you want is an art in and of itself. Emily’s crisp letters and careful painting to make a clear print show how much time and care she took in this process. After considering the different aspects of print and mechanized forms of text when comparing my work with Emily’s, I think mechanized writing forms have been an enormous benefit. The quick editing and ability to change ideas while writing makes for a more fluid process, and I think that is ultimately why I went in this direction for my own task.
I’m left wondering how other artistic forms of writing, such as calligraphy, might influence when we choose to write by hand? Is this something that would be better done on a computer with a different font choice?
References
Cooke, D. (2012, January 26). Upside Down, Left to Right: A Letterpress Film. https://youtu.be/n6RqWe1bFpM