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! 

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. 

Letterpress Party

Just distributed a bunch of these flyers all around Portland, and I didn't even mind doing it because I think this is actually going to be a great party. Also these flyers are hand-letterpressed and look super sweet.

Anyhow - I doubt this blog post is actually going to function as any kind of advertisement, but, you know, anyone who's in Portland and free on Saturday night should definitely come and check this out. As an Emspace member, I am going to be there, enjoying myself and doing a bad job of networking.

Weddings!! Part 2: Invitations Printed!?!!

I just finished printing up wedding invitations for some good friends of mine. (You may remember a post a did where I gathered up some other wedding invitations to use as inspiration.) I printed the invitations using a combination of hand-set metal type and lino blocks, using four different ink colours in all. There were two pieces - an invitation and an RSVP postcard that the invitee will mail back to say if they're coming, if they're a vegetarian etc. I'm not going to show the finished invitations, because obviously they have names and addresses on them, but I do have a few pics of the printing process and the RSVPs in progress.

Here we have some metal type, set up with leading and spacing material and ready to print. Setting type is useful if you want to learn how to read backwards and upside down.

All the type set up in galley trays to be printed later. The font I used here is Centaur (12 point), which is a fantastic serif font. It has a lot of subtle personality, and the numbers are great, too. (Invitations have a lot of numbers - dates and addresses.)

I printed at Emspace Book Arts Center, which has some wonderful letterpress facilities, and everyone there is very friendly. As you can see, it is bucketing it down outside.

This is the Vandercook SP15 proof press, which I used for most of the printing. For small pieces like the invitations I might have used a platen press, but this proof press could accommodate the lino blocks as well as the metal type.

The RSVPs, printed with metal type, drying in a rack. I used oil-based inks, and left the prints to dry for about 24 hours.

The SP15 inked up and ready to print a lino block.

This is going to add a little colour to the RSVPs. I'm pretty pleased with the turquoise ink I mixed - it looks nice and bright on the rollers.

The final round of prints. By the way, the paper I used was a natural white cardstock with eggshell finish - can't remember the weight, but it feels great, and printed nicely. Envelopes to match.

Stumptown Comics Fest 2011

I love Stumptown Comics Fest! So much amazing art, and everyone is so nice! Comics nerds are the best.


Here's most of my haul from this year; it should keep me going for a while. Some artists I had heard of, some were new to me. I got a couple of prints too.

Some new favourites were the Perfecting Loneliness 24-hour comics which you see top right, plus an issue of Wuvable Oaf, a hand-spot-coloured comic about bears. (The hairy gay guy kind.) Plus some old favourites: Papercutter, Clutch, Erika Moen.

Some links to check out:

Reid Psaltis (fantastic illustrator - got some of his foldout minicomics)
Sarah McIntyre (adorable childrens' book illustrations, plus comics)
Wuvable Oaf
Emi Lennox (Perfecting Loneliness etc.)
Farel Dalrymple (Yeah, this guy is amazing. And he drew a lovely drawing in the comic I bought from him.)
Papercutter etc.

Some Festive Prezzoes

Took some photos of a few Christmas presents before I packed them up and sent them out, because I thought they looked pretty.


Here we have presents for my parents, Tim, and Jen and Lucy. There are a few little prints in all of these, some other small bits and pieces, and a homemade card. In addition, I sent my parents chocolate for my Dad, and a completely lovely book by Shaun Tan, The Arrival, which I thought my Mum might like. Jen and Lucy received the Autostraddle calender. Also I sent them some cute erasers shaped like biscuits. Like you do.


Some little collections of prints for my housies. Below is what was in them. I did a little drawing of our house, which looks a lot nicer inside than out (in my opinion) so wasn't the best ever to draw. Still, it's home.


Some Portland, some foxes, some leaves, our house.

Where you LEARN to save

Just want to take a private second to mourn the passing of the bizarre sign board outside the Dollar Scholar ("Where you LEARN to save"). The store has moved to smaller premises, because let's face it they probably do not make a whole lot of money. Anyway, this thing always had something amusing written on it, I will miss seeing it. Also, why can I only find two photos? For shame!



Edit: Found another photo I took. And nicked one from the internet. Sorry, internet.

PDX Houses

While I was visiting home during the summer I came across all the prints I made during my awesome, amazing, inspirational, huggable Reed intaglio printmaking class. I also found a lot of other artistic rubbish (mostly in the junk section of the attic) that I have produced in my student art career, but I thought this lot was better fit for public exposure. Here's a series of three etchings I made of buildings in Portland. My obsession with this kind of American architecture pretty much starts here, and rabidly continues today.

Watch out for the Vortex

Some drawings from my sketchbook showing an idea (does this count as three ideas?) I've been throwing around. I think I may work this into a screenprint at some point. I nearly did something similiar to this for this series here, but in the end went with other ideas. These are scenes from around Portland, of course.

Red House, Blue House, PDX

I haven't been posting lately largely for two reasons: Number one, my poor lappy laptop isn't working because the power cable ist kaput. Number two, netflix streaming, specifically Cake Boss. Cake Boss makes me want to say stuff in a New York accent, specifically "modelling chocolate" and "fondant", but I cannot, and should not be allowed to try. Because I am from West Yorkshire. Nonetheless, it is an entertaining show.

Anyhow, I wanted to show off my best efforts at screenprinting thus far. I am not sure I am completely at home with screenprinting as a medium. I have found it dreadfully frustrating at times, I always seem to be overflooding the screen or getting the consistency of the ink wrong. I ruined quite a bit of fancy Arches 88 paper trying to get my final projects nice (luckily I'm good at reusing paper). It also requires me to tackle colour more than I am comfortable with - an etching in black ink is fine, but multiple colours are so accessible for a screenprint it seems lame not to try. I came up with a colour scheme for these four final prints that was a bit more crazy and bright than I would have anticipated of myself, but I kinda felt like it.




That's an electric etching press, I am told it's a Heidelberg. And yes, it is pink. I'm shocked too.











Inspired by the expensive houses up in the West Hills of Portland. They always remind me of giant pigeon lofts.

I will definitely be doing more screenprinting. It is a magical process, when you manage to get everything right.