Learn how to print on the Risograph, a machine that combines the ease of a photocopier with the stencil concept of silkscreen. A Risograph creates a stencil for each layer, printing a single color at a time. Inks are semi-opaque, so when layered two colors can create a third overlay.

Students will explore the process of digital Risograph printing through hands-on practice. They'll learn the basics of preparing digital files and using the equipment. Color separations & resizing of images will be discussed using Photoshop. By the end of the session, they'll have a small stack of Risograph prints to take home.

This workshop focuses on the digital approach to printing with a Risograph. The Introduction to Analog Risograph Printing workshop focuses on printing from paper substrates laid on the glass (like a photocopier). Either class will suffice as the prerequisite for the Risograph Certification workshop, though students are welcome to take both. Successful completion of the certification allows students to rent time on SFCB's Risograph.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply. 

Prerequisite: None

Tools/Materials to bring:

• REQUIRED: Laptop computer, ideally Mac (not an iPad), with Spectrolite software downloaded; Photoshop is not required but will be discussed. If you don't have a laptop, please sign up for the Analog workshop instead.
• A digital file you’d like to print, it does not have to be color separated. Print size will be 8.5 X 11" or 11 x 17". 

About the Instructor: Yasmeen Abedifard is an Iranian-American artist born in the San Francisco Bay Area and is currently based in Oakland. She holds an MFA from Cornell University. Her work is centered around storytelling mediums, including comics, illustrations, and animation.

She is currently teaching in the Comics program at The California College of the Arts (CCA), the UC Berkeley Art Studio, CCA Extension, and Dominican University. Her work has been featured in various spaces, such as the SF Art Book Fair, Rubenstein Arts Center, Shapeshifters Cinema, Jack Hanley Gallery, and San Francisco Center for the Book, and has received various accolades, including the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Minicomic for Death Bloom and the Mocca Award of Excellence for When to Pick a Pomegranate. She has taught comic workshops at BAMPFA, Mendocino Art Center, Secret Room, Kala Art Institute, Sequential Artists Workshop, and Black Mountain Institute. She has created several published comics, such as When to Pick a Pomegranate (pub. Silver Sprocket), Death Bloom (pub. Lucky Pocket), and Burnt (pub. Wiggle Bird Mailing Club).

She is also part of a comics collective called D.R.Y. with her peers, Daniel Zhou and Raul Higuera, aimed at fostering community and highlighting the Bay Area comics scene.

Looking to expand your letterpress skills? In this class, we will explore improvisatory ways of creating multicolor prints on the Vandercook without locking up typeforms on the press bed.

Freestyle letterpress printing is an improvisational approach where type and ornamentation are inked by hand in different colors and creatively placed on the press bed (without using quoins or furniture to lock them down). This gives you the opportunity to quickly and easily create unique monoprints as you play with type and combinations of color.

To begin the conversation with our tools and materials, we will:

• discuss historical precedents for creative letterpress printing by H.N. Werkman and Jack Stauffacher
• learn how to safely print metal and wood blocks without locking them up with quoins and furniture
• discover strategies for inking individual blocks, layering colors, and ghost printing
• explore approaches to improvisation using text prompts, game structures, and group interactivity (e.g., exquisite corpse, call-and-response, etc.)

At the end of the workshop, you will go home with a collection of monoprints that reflect your own aesthetic explorations using the Center’s vast collection of historic letters, numbers and ornaments.

Prerequisite: Introduction to Letterpress or other Vandercook press experience.

Materials to bring: None. All tools and materials will be provided.

About the Instructor: As a sound and visual artist, Gino Robair (he/him) explores how nonrepresentational imagery influences interpretive performances in music, dance, and theatre. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis, developing performative approaches to papermaking and letterpress printing. In November 2023, a collection of his most recent prints was exhibited at the San Francisco Center For New Music.

Learn how to print on the Risograph, a machine that combines the ease of a photocopier with the stencil concept of silkscreen. A Risograph creates a stencil for each layer, printing a single color at a time. Inks are semi-opaque, so when layered two colors can create a third overlay.

In this class you’ll create two image layers by hand, and each student will print a 2-color poster in an edition of 20. Come ready to turn sketches or drawings into your poster. If you would prefer not to draw, consider bringing clip art, traced designs, stamps, or collage elements to make your design.

This workshop focuses on the analog approach to printing with a Risograph. The Introduction to Digital Risograph Printing workshop focuses on preparing files and printing via digital transmission. Either class will suffice as the prerequisite for the Risograph Certification workshop, though students are welcome to take both. Successful completion of the certification allows students to rent time on SFCB's Risograph.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply. 

Prerequisite: None

Materials to bring:

• Sketches, drawings, photographs, or collage imagery no larger than 10” x 16” on paper or clear acetate (spot imagery smaller than 10” x 16” will work as well).
• Pens: black ink, all kinds of tips/types (sharpies, markers, brush pens, felt tip, different sized nibs, etc.) Faber Castell's PITT pens or Micron's are examples where you have different sized nibs. You can also bring pencils (especially softer/darker ones if you want more hand-drawn imagery). Essentially anything to make a drawn mark with! Colored markers in yellows and pinks won't work well, though.
• Photos can be fun. Make sure they aren't precious in case you want to cut them up. Grayscale with a wide value range work the best, rather than color photos. You can print out or photocopy what you want to play with and bring that, rather than the original.
• Collage materials: papers with patterns, tapes like washi, templates or stencils for making shapes, black or dark construction paper for cutting out shapes.
• Stamps/stamp pad and letter/number stickers are great if you want to work with text.
• Scissors or X-acto knife; glue stick or clear tape; eraser.
• Please print out any digital imagery before class, no larger than 11" x 17", with a 1/2" border all around.

About the Instructor: Nathalie Roland (she/her) is a San Francisco-based printmaker and painter who has been creating woodcut prints since 1991. Working from her Sunset district garage studio known as Sunset Paperworks, she specializes in woodcut reduction prints using pine or mulberry wood blocks that transform through multiple stages of carving and printing. She has studied relief printing under Zarina Hashmi, screen printing at Ape Do Good, worked as a bookbinder at the Arion Press and was formerly the in-house Riso printer for Yellow Owl workshop. 

Create your own beautiful, unique journal. Students will use a special punch tool to construct sewing stations in the suede leather cover. Then we’ll fold and stitch inside pages for the multi-signature book, with an option to add a button closure.

The finished book makes a lovely keepsake or gift, and this workshop is a great introduction to basic bookbinding skills.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite: None

Materials to Bring: All tools and materials are provided.

About the Instructor: Elaine G. Chu (she/her) has taught students of all ages, in person and online. Her work has been featured in “Greencraft” and “Somerset Studio” magazines as well as “1000 Artists’ Books.” She co-authored “Wood Paper Scissors,” a how-to crafts book. Elaine received a B.A. in music at Yale University and a B.F.A. in graphic design at University of the Arts. View more at EGChuHandcrafted.etsy.com and on Instagram @egchu1.

In this three day knife making and sharpening workshop, we will make several knives by hand using stock reduction, and discuss, sharpen, alter, clean and restore a wide variety of edge tools that participants bring.

Specific attention will be paid to the tools that book and paper conservators frequently use: paring knives, lifting knives, spatulas, scissors, hole punches, spokeshaves and board shear blades.

Basic principals of steel and blade geometry will be discussed. This class will focus on the techniques of efficient free-hand sharpening, which is applicable to any sharpening system.

Participants will use 3M Microfinishing film to make a large paring or lifting knife, two small knives of their choosing, and refurbish and sharpen existing knives. The goal is to free participants from the plethora of misinformation and mystique that surrounds sharpening and the shaping material using hand tools, and learn fundamental freehand techniques.

Click here for a preview of how and why to sharpen your knives correctly.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. There is a 50% need-based scholarship set aside for this class. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite:
None

Materials to bring:
All tools and materials will be provided. Students should also bring their own knives or other edge tools in need of sharpening.

About the Instructor:
Jeff Peachey is a bookbinder and book conservator providing a wide variety of bookbinding and conservation services for institutions and individuals. He is a Professional Associate in the AIC and has served as Chair of Conservators In Private Practice.

He is the inventor of the Peachey Board Slotting Machine, which is used by many institutions worldwide to help treat books with detached boards. He is also active in researching the history of bookbinding. 

One of his current passions is investigating the philosophy of tools, which he maintains have a much larger role in craft than previously thought. For the past 25 years, Jeff has been designing and making innovative bookbinding tools, see more at: peacheytools.com 

This workshop takes place on three consecutive Thursday evenings.

Let’s pick up where we left off on our last night—Billy's take on Copperplate/Spencerian. We’ll practice our strokes and bring them together to create upper and lower case letter forms. Then we'll experiment with different inks and gouaches on various papers.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite: Hand Lettering I

Materials to bring: 

Mechanical pencil
Pelikan® 4001 Brilliant Black Ink
Straight Pen Holder
Ultra-Fine Point Sharpie®
C-Thru® B-85 Ruler

(A limited number of inks will available for purchase directly from Billy)

About the Instructor: Billy Ola Hutchinson’s passion for lettering began in pre-school with the assistance of Mommy Billie. Billy and Billie spent hours shaping letterforms day in and day out. Later in life, Little Billy parlayed that lettering passion into a calligraphic profession, creating a petit line of stationery, penning custom lettering for clients, designing a line of porcelain for San Francisco's luxury speciality store, Gump’s and of course as an instructor at SFCB—taking students through those first steps Little Billy took with Big Billie. Billy's lettering has been featured in magazines, wedding invitations, place cards, monograms, and brand identities.

Cylinder Core Certificate Program

The four class Cylinder Core Certificate Program allows students to move quickly through press basics while also addressing relief printing in general. Students who finish the four Core classes are qualified to rent press time as well as move on to more advanced classes and techniques. Core classes must be taken in order, 1 through 4.

Click here to learn more about the Cylinder Core Certificate Program and how to receive a discount!

Cylinder Core 3: Posterized

Develop your letterpress design skills and aesthetic while increasing your letterpress versatility.

Learn to set up the press, refine your registration skills, and run an edition. Learn more about packing, roller height, and make-ready. Students will have access to the Center's collection of wood type and cuts (images) for this project. Come ready to run an edition of your own 12 x 15" poster!

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Materials to Bring: All tools and materials will be provided. Students can bring ideas for a poster-worthy short phrase, probably just a few words to set in large type.

Please note: Class projects are for learning particular skills and supporting class dynamics. Project ideas should be flexible, open to what class time and communal studio use will permit.

About the Instructor: Paula Gloistein (she/her) has an MA in Humanities from Dominican College which really has very little to do with her work as a photographer, designer, and letterpress printer. After more than ten years in the wedding biz, she opened a small shop, big day design lounge, that showcases handmade wedding accessories, custom invitations, and workshops for crafty couples.

Scaleboard is thin wood that was used in some American bindings (particularly around Boston) as early as the 1680s through the 1840s. It was used even as paste- or pulp-board materials became widely available in America.

In this two-day workshop, students will learn the variations found in these wonderfully simple American bindings through examination of historical examples and discussion. We will also consider current theories regarding the use and manufacture of scaleboard as a material.

The workshop will culminate in the hands-on creation of two models: a full leather binding and a quarter leather binding with paper-covered boards.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite: Students should be comfortable sewing multi-section textblocks; Bookbinding Core 2 or equivalent

Materials to bring: All tools and materials will be provided. Students are also welcome to bring any of their own favorite bookbinding tools.

About the Instructor: Bill Hanscom (they/them) is a library conservation professional, educator, and author. Since 2009, they have worked as a conservation technician for special collections at Harvard Library’s Weissman Preservation Center. They taught undergraduate courses in bookbinding, letterpress printing, book art theory, and independent publishing for the Book Arts BFA program at Montserrat College of Art from 2010 to 2023, serving as its coordinator for seven years. For more than a decade, Bill has regularly taught workshops on historical bookbinding structures and other book arts and preservation topics for North Bennet Street School, the Guild of Bookworkers, and other organizations. Bill lives in Rockport, Massachusetts with their wife and three children.