Chat with Marcroy Smith

Recently I had been briefly emailing Marcroy Smith, who is the director and founder of People of Print. He has freelanced as well as working for some established print studios, and is also the founding editor and art director for 'Print Isn't Dead' magazine alonside 'Posterzine' which are published by People of Print; this has made him a pretty well-known name in the printing world.

I emailed him initially about some potential work experience and for some advice, and he replied that we should organise a meeting one day to have a chat. While we were at Print Stuff I realised that People of Print had a table, so I emailed him again to let him know that I was going to be there too and whether we could have a chat, to which he replied 'great! see you there. :)'

Once I was at Print Stuff I felt pretty nervous to go down and have a chat with him, but knew it was be worth it- so I went down and introduced myself and we had a long chat about the industry and my practise and he gave me a lot of helpful advice:

• He mentioned that when contacting professionals or print studios it's much better to research the person/the company beforehand so you know what they do/what they're about and they'll be much more inclined to reply
• I showed him my instagram and bits of my work and he seemed to really like it. He also gave me a lot of advice about the printing process and how I could make my prints more refined. He said it might help to overlap each edge of my colours in my prints to avoid getting the small white gap between colours you can sometimes see in my print. He did also say he was very impressed with the registration of my prints
• He asked whether i'd want to continue screen printing after uni which I said I wanted to. So he gave me me some advice on which screen printing studios to go to in London, and said that it was better to go for the smaller print studios as the more well-known ones were a lot messier
• Speaking about my practise and what directions I should go in, he gave me some advice on what sort of things I could think about producing. He mentioned that my work would really suit an enamel pin badge, and if it was something I ever wanted to go they could sort it out for me and told me to let him know when I had a deign ready
• I also told him that I was currently producing some wooden figurines, and he said he thought they would make some really cool book-ends for book shelves
• At the end he told me that their Brighton studio was currently getting re-done but he'd keep me in mind for any internships or work experience, or even just coming down one day to have a look around which is exciting!

I thoroughly enjoyed the chat we had and it's given me a lot of confidence in my work, and I found it really useful chatting to someone who had so much experience in the creative industry. After we finished talking he came upstairs where out stall was and had a look at my work which was really nice. He also followed me on my illustration account on instagram so hopefully we'll keep in contact!