Click the image for a short video of my potato printing process!
Was there something particularly challenging in the process?
One of the most challenging parts of this process what picking what word to create. I pondered over this all week! The perfectionist in me wanted to pick the right word or at least a good one. Then I continued the over think it and started to worry about which letters would be more difficult to create than others. I ended up going with the very first word that came to mind at the beginning of the week “TEACH”. Another challenging part was making sure my letters were the correct way! Luckily it came to me before cutting the potatoes, so I was able to stop and think that process through. And lastly, once I created my first attempt with my “E” I realized that my cutting was really uneven therefore my print did not create a full “E”. So, I ended up shaving off the top layer with my knife to remove any imperfections. After doing this I proceed to do this to all of them to try and make sure that they all had flat surfaces. In doing this, I then had to repaint each potato again, hence the painting pattern was not the same as the first attempt.
How much time did it take for you to create the stamps?
This process of cutting the stamps took about 30 minutes to complete. Each letter took about four minutes to create. I found myself cutting off all the round edges of the letters first before tackling smaller nooks. Creating the stamps took the longest, as for the actual printing part, that went super quick.
Have you noticed anything particular about the letters that you have chosen to reproduce?
I clearly decided to do the letters in uppercase as I wanted to use the majority of the potato. I also decided to use block lettering and avoided any curves.
Considering the time and effort that took you to create a 5-letter word, how do you feel about the mechanization of writing?
The process and effort it took me to create a 5-letter word was time consuming and tedious. I had to make sure that each letter looked as perfect as possible. I had to stop myself from wanted to make it perfect also. I wanted to go back and redo certain letters after I had made the print because it looked better on the potato than it did on the paper. This entire process was challenging yet exciting as there was some technicality behind creating these letters. According to Bolter (2001), mechanization is involved in all writing as it is a technical skill. I made the letters quite large which worked great for my five-letter word. However, if I had to write even just a sentence, the font would have been way to large. As Clement (1997), states when Gutenberg and Schoeffer designed their first print, it “turned out to be too large” as they realized that they would only be able to fit so many lines of words on one piece of paper (p. 13). Bolter (2001) noted that the mechanics of writing and its popularity were linked to efficient, clean, clear texts. In order to create clear and clean writing using prints such as potato printing, time would be a huge issue.
References
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Clement, Richard W. (1997). “Medieval and Renaissance book production”. Library Faculty & Staff Publications. Paper 10. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/lib_pubs/10