Your first month of letterpress printing
Most people expect to mess up the press. What surprises them is how much the ink and paper teach you first.
By The JustBeginning Editors · Published June 3, 2026
Letterpress printing has a reputation for being fussy — all that ink, those rollers, the mechanical quirks of a 60-year-old press. That reputation is partly earned. But the part beginners worry about most (the press itself) is usually not where the learning curve actually is. What surprises most people in the first month is how much you learn from the ink, the paper, and the relationship between them, before the mechanical stuff ever becomes the hard part.
This is what your first month actually looks like, week by week.
Week 1: Before you print anything
If you’ve already bought a press: don’t turn it on yet. Spend the first few sessions understanding how everything fits together — rollers, ink disk, platen, feed board — before you introduce ink.
If you haven’t bought a press yet, that’s actually fine. Week one is for design and plates, not machinery. Here’s the sequence that works:
-
Design a simple project in Illustrator, Affinity Designer, or even Inkscape. A business card, a folded note, a simple tag. One color. One side. No photographs — use clean vector artwork with lines at least 0.5pt thick.
-
Send your file to a polymer plate service (Boxcar Press or Owosso Graphics). They’ll expose and develop the plate and ship it to you in 3–5 business days. This is your first printing surface — a shallow-relief polymer plate that mounts in your press and transfers ink to paper.
-
Use the waiting time to order ink, paper, and a few tools. Van Son Rubber Base Plus in black. A 25-sheet sample of Crane Lettra 110# cotton paper. A couple of soft rubber brayers. A quart of mineral spirits. That’s your first print kit.
The waiting-for-plates window is also the right time to watch Arm & Hammer Press on YouTube and read through the Boxcar Press setup guides. Not because you need to memorize everything — because you want to have seen the process before you’re standing at a press trying to remember it.
Week 2: First ink, first impression
When your plates arrive, resist the urge to print immediately. Do these five things in order before you ever touch good paper:
1. Ink up the press with scrap paper. Tear up some cheap copy paper into card-sized pieces. Mix a small amount of ink on your glass slab — no more than a pea-sized amount — and distribute it across the press rollers with a brayer. Run scrap paper through the press a dozen times. Watch how the ink transfers. Is it even? Too thick? Too light? You’re calibrating your eye before you’re calibrating the press.
2. Check your roller height. Rollers that ride too high leave thin, starved coverage. Too low and they smash into your plate instead of kissing it. Most tabletop presses have roller trucks you can shim or adjust. A simple stripe test tells you: roll the ink across a flat surface and check for even coverage end to end. If it’s uneven, something is off.
3. Mount your polymer plate. Using double-sided tape, center the plate on the base of your press (or on the Boxcar Base if you have one). Press it down firmly — bubbles under the plate cause uneven impression.
4. Set your gauge pins. Gauge pins are the small metal clips that hold your paper in exact position so every impression lands in the same spot. Most beginners skip this and spend an hour wondering why their prints aren’t registering consistently. Set them up first, every time.
5. Run ten test impressions on copy paper, then adjust. Check impression depth (too light? add packing behind the tympan), ink coverage (too heavy? remove ink; too light? add a tiny bit more), and registration (is the design where you want it on the sheet?). Print the first sheet of Lettra only when all three are right.
Most people spend a full afternoon on their first run. That’s normal and correct. Rushing to good paper before setup is dialed ruins your Lettra and your confidence simultaneously.
Week 3: The ink tells you everything
By week three, the press mechanics start to feel predictable. The learning shifts to ink — and this is where letterpress gets genuinely interesting.
Ink film thickness is everything. Too much ink and your fine lines fill in, serifs disappear, and the overall print looks heavy and muddy. Too little and coverage is uneven and patchy. The right amount looks almost too thin on the ink disk — barely there. The press will surprise you with how far a small amount of ink goes.
Ink behavior changes with temperature. Oil-based inks like Van Son flow more easily in a warm room (65–75°F is ideal) and stiffen in the cold. If you’re printing in a cool garage or basement, let your ink warm up to room temperature before the session. Cold ink piles up on the rollers and prints unevenly.
Paper affects ink pickup. Crane Lettra 110# has enough surface tooth to hold ink beautifully with minimal ink — you can often use less ink than you expect. Smoother papers (coated stock, even some fine art papers) need a slightly heavier ink film. The relationship between ink viscosity and paper surface is what letterpress printers spend years learning to read.
This is also the week most beginners try their first two-color run — and discover how much setup time color changes add. Each color requires: cleaning all rollers completely (with mineral spirits), re-inking with the new color, re-registering the paper, and running test impressions. A two-color card that takes 90 minutes to print one-color takes three hours for two colors. Not a reason not to do it. Just worth knowing.
Week 4: When it clicks
Around week four, something shifts. Setup that took you two hours in week two takes forty minutes. You stop double-checking roller height every session because you’ve internalized what it should feel like. You start thinking about designs in terms of what will print well — bold lines, clean edges, generous spacing — instead of fighting against your natural graphic design instincts.
A few things that become obvious by the end of month one:
Letterpress is a subtractive design process. Unlike screen printing or offset where you can print almost anything, letterpress rewards restraint. White space isn’t empty — it’s part of the design. A card with three words and one clean illustration often beats a busy layout. This is not a limitation; it’s what makes the medium feel like itself.
The tactile quality is the whole point. Run your thumb across the back of a finished letterpress print and feel the slight relief from the impression. That’s the thing offset printing can’t replicate. Clients, friends, and recipients feel it before they read it. Design for touch, not just sight.
Mistakes are how you learn the press. An ink pile-up (too much ink, rollers printing onto non-image areas) teaches you ink distribution. A blind deboss (impression with no ink) teaches you impression pressure. A mis-registration on a two-color run teaches you patience with gauge pins. Every failure is information — and unlike a failed digital design, a failed letterpress print is a beautiful object you can still hold.
What to do next
After your first month, you have two paths:
Go deeper on the same press. Try a two-color design. Experiment with blind deboss (impression without ink). Try printing on unusual substrates — thick chipboard, kraft paper, cotton fabric. Play with ink mixing to match a specific color. You haven’t scratched the surface of what a small tabletop press can do.
Graduate to a larger press. If the Kelsey 5x8 has you wanting more print area, more consistent impression, or simply more capacity, start watching for a C&P Pilot or a proof press (Vandercook-style). The community at Briar Press and the Letterpress & Paper Arts Facebook group will help you evaluate specific presses before you buy.
Either way: keep printing. The only way to develop a feel for ink is ink-on-paper repetitions, and the first month gets you to the point where each one teaches you something.
Ready to gear up? See our letterpress printing gear guide for the press, plates, ink, and paper worth buying first.