Simple Growth

Well folks, it's time for another lengthy blog post about how I print stuff. This time, I printed some business cards and some promo postcards for the lovely Natasha, and her business Simple Growth Consulting. I took some slightly rubbish cellphone pictures along the way, to show some steps of the printing process. 

First, cut the paper down to print size. I tend to work in larger pieces than the final product, to give a bit more leeway when printing, and then trim down to final size as the last step. 

Chopp'd. Even tiny pieces of paper, like these business cards, can be cut using the following gigantic guillotine.

Look at this cast-iron monstrosity of a guillotine. Very sharp blade.

Time to mix the inks. Here are three of the four inks I needed to mix the right colour.

And here they are, ready to be mixed.

Ta-da! And that's how you make sage green. 

I printed the business cards on this Chandler and Price platten press.

It's all inked up with the aforementioned sage green.

Inked up on a different occasion with a darker sage green - this is for the logo on the back of the business cards. 

 Some metal type set for the business cards, locked into the C & P platten press. Note that it's in reverse. 

Stacks of business cards waiting to be printed in a second colour. The business cards needed four different printings altogether; three for the postcards.

The two blocks needed to print the logo on the back of the business cards.

And the resulting printed logo. 

Part two: printing the postcards. 

I used a different press to print the postcards: this is the Vandercook SP15 proof press. It's better for slightly larger pieces, but it's slower to print each one.

A block locked into the press, ready to print. 

This is the second block needed to print the postcards.

The SP15 press.

The finished postcards, stacked in the drying rack. The ink I was using took 2 or 3 days to dry - longer for image areas than type - before the prints could be cut down and finished with.

So there you have it - my latest print project. It was a lot of fun to do, and a nice challenge. Loved the combination of the paper and the ink colours - very Portland, somehow! 

Latest Letterpress Printing Project

I recently printed a set of wedding invitations for the delightful Keith and Vicki, so I thought I would post some pictures giving a few hints about the printing process. I worked on these at the excellent Em Space studio, using the SP15 flat bed proof press. The invitations are a combination of lino cut and metal type; three colours and four printings in all. 

Here's the first printing, using the lino block with a carved treeline - this will be printed over with the invite text and another linoblock layer.

The block locked securely into the press with furniture and quoins. (The quoins are the metal things on the bottom and left of the block.) This colour looks like more of a mint green on the press, but it's less blue when printed.

Prints left to dry on the rack. I usually leave prints for 24 hours to make sure they're dry before printing on them again. No smudges! Especially with this large area of ink. 

The metal type all set up to print. Notice that this text is center-aligned, so an equal amount of lead spacing material is placed on either side of the sentence. Large amounts of center-aligned type is quite a pain. (Justified is the worst.)

Testing out the ink colours I mixed for this project. It's better to try them out on paper to accurately see how they will print.

The ink cabinet. We have rubber-based and oil-based inks. Different textures, different drying times. I tend to prefer oil-based inks.

The press set up for the darker green colour. This is the final run - the text has already been printed.

This is the same block that I used for the dark green, but I carved an area of it away - kind of a reduction cut method.

This is the SP15 press from the side.

Racks of spacing material in various sizes. 

A type cabinet  - for this project I used a sans-serif font in font sizes 14 and 24. Those are in the typecases down at the bottom - very heavy and difficult to maneuver. 

The finished invitations, put in envelopes and ready for mailing out. I chose a light brown envelope, with a little texture to it, to complement the foresty colour palette.

The original sketches for the design. Sorry these are especially rubbish pics, but you get the idea.

(By the way, I took all of these photos with my phone, so sorry they aren't better quality in general!)

Shredded Hexagons

Well here's my finished zine, you saw the type set for the cover in an earlier entry...

It's a pretty decent zine, I think, I'm proud of it! Especially because I made the thing in less than a week, printing and all. 

LGBT YA BOOK CLUB YAY: Girl Walking Backwards

Here we have the first book in this summer's one-woman LGBT YA reading mission. (Such an acronym-heavy genre, I love it.)

Girl Walking Backwards

by Bett Williams

Sometimes I forget how totally intense Young Adult fiction can be, subject matter-wise. I just finished The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, which is by all accounts a book for grown-ups, but it didn't have half the 'adult' themes that Girl Walking Backwards has. If I were to sum up the story of The Marriage Plot, I would say it was about one fairly average woman and two men who become steadily less suitable for her. I mean, it had a little sex and some mental illness, but it was basically tame. Girl Walking Backwards has drugs, alcohol, self-harming, masturbation, sexual abuse, divorce, satanism, sex and mental illness. I don't know how the kids can handle it.

I would totally recommend Girl Walking Backwards, though. It's about a girl living in Santa Barbara, CA, trying to cope with a mother who is basically in a self-help cult, an awol father, and falling in love with a damaged goth girl. The protagonist is very likeable, and if occasionally the prose wanders into teen melodrama territory it does at least feel authentic. Plus, as mentioned above, a tonn of exciting stuff happens.

Twilight/Bring It On Drunken Double Bill

You may know that creating drinking games for movies is pretty much one of my favourite things. I have amassed a pretty good collection, for a variety of movies and also, very importantly, Eurovision. So here's a couple more of them for your viewing/boozing pleasure.

The Bring It On drinking game:

Drink for the following:

• Lesbian subtext
• Every time a word is altered to include the word "cheer"
• Kirsten Dunst says "Duh"
• Spirit Fingers
• Bull Horns ("Go Toros!")
• Someone does a somersault
• Training montage

The Twilight drinking game:

Drink for the following:

• Jean shorts
• Every time someone tells Bella she's awesome
• Self-hug (i.e. When Bella is having an emotion and hugs herself while looking vulnerable.)
• Sparkles!
• GAY.
• Things that you would be arrested for in real life, but Bella finds romantic. (i.e. creepy behaviour, Love=Murder.)
• Adorably clumsy
• Softcore abstinence porn
• Montage

Quite frankly, you can whip up a perfectly decent drinking game for more or less any movie if you follow only two rules: drink whenever there is a montage, or whenever something is kind of gay. Who knew that homoeroticism and training montages would be the building blocks of modern cinema?

The Amazing...?

Apologies for the slightly rubbish quality of these pics; my phone does not have the best camera. (I've realised it tends to focus pretty weirdly, apart from anything else. Like, thanks phone, a small point in the top right-hand corner is obviously likely to be the important thing to look at.)

Anyway, here's a quick bit of letterpress for the front cover of the zine I made for the Portland Zine Symposium. I'll post some pics of the actual zine shortly. Nothing fancy, just this nice san-serif font from the Em Space collection in 72 point.

Zines Galore

This weekend I went to the Portland Zine Symposium and picked up this lot, all through trades. Pretty good haul, I think. I'm going to read through them, and then I might come back and tell you about the best ones. 

Just Some Photies

I haven't posted for ages so I thought I would just put up a few photos on here. Nothing spectacular, it's just that I'm super excited that I have a new phone and the camera on it isn't half bad. It's not great, either, so I'm still going to be using my actual proper camera.