Vegetable-based stamps. © Les Tricyclettes
In Brest, the Tricyclettes and their nomadic workshops make you roll up your sleeves by offering on a street corner initiation to screen printing or tampography, with 100% vegetable-based DIY inks.
Bretons friends, you have maybe come across funny three wheelers since the beginning of the school year. A red one, a yellow one, a blue one, the Tricyclettes travel all around the city and stop at a street corner to free your creative mind, during the time it would take for a stroll or a coffee break. These carts carry all the necessary equipment to undertake itinerant workshops of graphic design and printed art.
In red, screen print; in yellow, dab away; in blue, take photographs! In no longer than five minutes, leave with your artwork (postcards, tote-bags, posters). The key word being experimentation, to reveal the creator that lies dormant in each one of us.
The association Kuuutch, initiated and lead by Julien Masson and Nathalie Le Bihan, aiming to bring to light the pool of local creators, got together with Ultra Editions, in order to imagine DIY-DIT workshops favoring another form of social and inter-generational link. It set up participative teaching based on techniques linked to graphic arts. Generalizing artistic techniques and making them accessible to the broadest possible audience, this is what drives the said tricyclists, based on a long-term approach.
From bicycle to tricycle
The origin of the concept imagined by two designers from Brest, Thibault Fournier and Sarah Laubie, was an old postman’s bicycle. From 3 bicycles bought at Decathlon, 3 carts, wooden brackets, 3 pots of paint, metal frames and stencils, the tricycles were born at the end of summer, with two strokes of a jigsaw and three strokes of a hammer. The plans of the transformation are available in the Art libre licence on the Flatshape platform.
DIY vegetable-based inks
In October, during the Brest soup Festival, the tricyclists joined forces with the Disco’Soupe event to find a second creative life for food waste. The opportunity to experiment several vegetable-based ink recipes.
On the menu: making of screen printing ink by mixing radish tops with carrot juice, spinach juice, beetroot or even strawberry juice. In order to thicken the screen printing ink a little, the creators are now testing recipes with seaweed. In this zero waste creative approach, everything can be used and tested: branches, skin, abandoned vegetables. 30 seconds in the blender, a strainer to filter the pieces and bob’s your uncle. The colors then are adjusted depending on the mixtures, like an artist with his palette.
We will next see the Tricyclettes in Brest for the European week of waste reduction (November 21-29) and the official opening of the Christmas market on November 27, with screen printing and stamping workshops using inks from recycled coffee grounds. The ambition of the project is to be able to park, as soon as the beginning of the 2016 school year, the Tricycles in school playgrounds all around France to introduce little makers to artistic techniques.
The Facebook page of the Tricyclettes