Tired of lino? Design your image, let UV light do the carving, and hand-print an edition to take home.
About this Event
Explore the intersection of folk printmaking and contemporary UV-sensitive photopolymer printing techniques.
Edinburgh Photopolymer Workshop 🏴
Edinburgh has no shortage of lino printing classes, and they're lovely — but if you've done one, you'll remember the hand cramp, and the fine line you wanted becoming a thick one you didn't.
Photopolymer skips all of that. You draw; light does the cutting. And because nothing is carved by hand, the plate holds detail a blade can't — thin lines, texture, handwriting, the wobble in your own pen.
Then it's back to something very old: ink the plate, lay the paper, press, peel.
Explore the unexpected dialogue between two folk printmaking traditions — the woodblock imagery of prints and the bold, narrative visual culture of Scottish broadsheets and Highland folk art.
This workshop draws inspiration from both traditions: the symbolic storytelling of woodblock prints, and the graphic strength found in Scotland's own history of hand-printed ballads, clan imagery, and decorative folk motifs. Participants will design their own image — drawing freely from either tradition, or finding something entirely in between — and transform it into a photopolymer relief printing plate using UV exposure technology.
The result is a hand-printed edition you take home: tactile, layered, and made entirely by your own hands.
Unlike photographic processes such as cyanotype, this workshop is rooted in relief printmaking — where light is used to build a printable surface, not to capture an image. The process is closer in spirit to the ancient woodblock than to the darkroom.
Event venue & nearby stays
Silvan House, 231 Corstorphine Rd Corstorphine, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.