OUGD502 MANCHESTER PRINT FAIR

To get back into the swing of visiting exhibitions and going to print festivals, and generally interacting with the creative world, I took a day trip to Manchester and visited the Manchester Print Fair at the People's History Museum, which had a wide range of stalls selling all different styles of illustration and design. There were also workshops from screen printing to origami for the public to try their hand at. Manchester Print Fair was also sponsored by G F Smith, who ran a series of workshops during the event such as origami from Japan Society North West, and letterpress from Nick Berchall/Cleeve Press.

This is a flyer for the print fair. It uses a bold, minimal design as the background, one that is reflected with inverted colours, to create an image of two arrows. This arrow design may reflect the recycling element of the print fair, as a lot of the artists exhibiting used environmentally sourced stock where possible. It could also reflect reusing unwanted things, recycling them and making better use of them. It is a very vectorised design, one that doesn't really reflect the nature of the festival, being a print fair, you would expect the flyers to be screen printed or risograph printed. However just traditionally printing the flyers I can only assume helped to keep the cost down. 

This is a leaflet for the print fair, with the same front cover as the flyer, to keep a unified appearance. The only difference is that the colours have been changed, perhaps to differentiate between the two different products. Both however have a very fresh, neutral feel to them, with the simple shapes and the unisex colours used.

These are three cards by Bex Williams, an exhibitor at the print fair. I was immediately drawn to her work by the cheekiness of the giraffe illustration shown here. Her illustrations weren't precise or a photographic representation, especially her charcoal ones, which were carefree and slightly messy, but showed the animals in such a charming and humorous light. Her watercolour animal illustrations were slightly more serious, often with the animals in a portrait view, however the paint splodges around the animal itself on the paper emphasised her medium, watercolour, and gave a youthful feel to the colourful paintings. 

This Star Wars illustration by Dick Vincent also caught my eye simply because I am a little bit obsessed with Star Wars, and C3P0 stood out in his shining gold glory on the page. Vincent has used watercolour and illustration to produce this illustration, which gives it a very hand drawn appearance, one that isn't perfect and precise, but with a slight childlike quality to it, which makes it very endearing. It also doesn't try and overcomplicate the piece, by not including a ground as such, but leaving the bottoms of the trees cut off and floating in the air. However because of perspective, you still get a sense that the trees are extending back into the woods, rather than actually floating in the air. This is a very charming piece which I was really drawn to.

This was a screen print that I produced at the print fair, where I printed the black colour onto the page, giving the finishing detail. I `m not sure which printing house ran this workshop, as they didn't have any business cards, and their name wasn't on the print itself unfortunately.

This was another screen print I produced at the print fair, by Hot Bed Press, I printed the darker colour onto the paper. I found it really interesting how where the colours overlay, a pink of the lighter pink can be seen coming through, which creates an interesting texture to the print. 

Visiting Manchester Print Fair has really helped me get back in touch with the creative world, and given me enthusiasm to experiment more with printing, both in my own time and including it in briefs.