Printmaking Workshop | Design & Hand-Print Your Own Edition | Edinburgh

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.