See what we created at the foil workshop
Thanks to Emma at Foilco who invited us to their recent foil workshop at a central London venue. Emma for those that have known us for a while now, worked with us at Bureau on the corporate branding. She is now the Brand Relationship Manager at Foilco and so we still have a common link in branding. The workshop was a fun hands-on way for people to play with foil and see what could be created. The event was attended by a lot of designers and students who were clearly having fun exploring the potential. And it was interesting to see how others went about it and what they created.
We had several attempts and here are our best results. My best print was of a clock (actually a clock from a Japanese Bullet train at the York Train Museum, if you are interested) which came out OK - not brilliant but it produced a strong print. Jo did far better with her Jo’s bird-&-rose effort, taken from one of the drawings used in her tattoo as it happens.
The process we tried was surprisingly simple, involving a printer and laminating machine. For it to work well a high-contrast print was needed - the easiest solution was to grab one of the Sharpie pens around and make you own drawing, but you could also use a photo or scan an image. From the resulting print you laid the foil of your choice on top, put the sandwich through the laminating machine, and the foil stuck neatly to the toner to create your foil print. The result depended so much on the paper and foil combination and the artwork chosen.
Below you can see something of the process involved when I did my clock print.
Jo had the artwork from one of her tattoos available, as you do, and this really did the business - see the video below for the process at work.
So how can this help you? Foil is maybe a dying art, certainly under threat from the advent of digital printing, but there are some things digital print cannot do. The sheer beauty of a metallic foil print really stands out, and if you go for the rainbow shimmer foil then the results are on a different scale to printed results. Don’t overlook foil when thinking about how you might customise your notebooks.
