It only took a couple of beers, and 20 minutes of print time for this to finally happen. Maybe you are familiar with linocut printmaking. This is similar, except instead of carving up a block of lino, we’re experimenting with making printing plates out of plastic on a 3d printer. These tiny things we made are also Truchet tiles, you can arrange a bunch of them to make non-repeating patterns. (Or repeating patterns, you can do that too if you like).
Last night we made our first couple of tiles to print from, and the results were surprisingly acceptable, given that this was just a beer-fueled experiment. We learned a lot from this experiment too. Inking these tiny things is hard! We need some magnets and a steel plate to stick them on to ink them properly, probably. And using a spare bit of lino to support the etching press was super clunky, so we’ll need to print up some support runners to place along the sides so the whole thing doesn’t slip and slide everywhere. But the big lesson is this is doable.
