Bringing Together Print Studio Professionals

World Printmakers proudly announces the creation of Print Workshop Central, a new website designed specifically for print studio professionals worldwide. The site is not only a forum designed to bring together print people from all over the world to share ideas and solutions, but an online resource center to provide them with contacts and information to enhance their operations.

"Clearly there is a current of common interest running through printmaking workshops around the world," says Mike Booth, World Printmakers founder and publisher, "but until now there has never been a medium for uniting their community, expressing their needs and points of view, or for redressing their grievances. That's what we hope to achieve with Print Workshop Central. Essentially it's about empowering a community which is hardly aware that it's a community."

Art Prints, Vulgar Copies

Online in a beta version since mid-June this new World Printmakers initiative is also concerned with fine-art-print advocacy. "There are so many interests in the world today which are in the business of blurring the borders between fine-art prints and vulgar copies," says Booth, referring to the industrial campaign to market "giclee" copies as art prints. "Behind this trend lie the interests of massively powerful manufacturers of inkjet printers, inks and papers," adds Booth. "After years of seeing inkjet copies passed off as 'fine-art prints' we finally decided that someone had to take the initiative in denouncing these practices and organizing print professionals everywhere in their own defense against all forms of print fraud, both hard and soft."

Print Workshop Central's objectives, as listed on the site's homepage include:

• To provide a high-visibility universal showcase for professional fine-art printmaking workshops, their artists and their work
• To provide these workshops with an open forum for the interchange of ideas, suggestions, best practices, and points of view
• To make creative use of the World Wide Web and the Web 2.0 to increase awareness and impact of authentic fine-art prints and their authors among art lovers everywhere.
• To provide information regarding issues of authenticity and authors' rights
• To be an advocacy and organization center for the defense of authentic fine-art prints
• To maintain a central register of opportunities for print workshops and artists
• To provide print workshop people with a forum for exchanging current technical information on the ever-evolving states of the various print media
• And to offer them a comfortable and familiar context in which to relate to, learn from and share with one another
  
  
  

Members Come from All Round the World

Early response to the Print Workshop Central project has been positive. Thus far they have signed up member workshops from the U.S.A., Canada, the U.K., Australia, Ireland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Spain, Denmark, France, China and New Zealand.

More information on the Print Workshop Central project, and the procedure for participating are available here: How Print Workshop Central Works
or email World Printmakers.