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! 

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. 

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.

Diary/Planner/Journal

I recently made this planner for my friend Rosie, who found herself in need of one in March, which is apparently when the stores stop selling planners. Even Powells had run out.

I printed the pages and bound the thing together using chainstitch with a cloth spine and card covers, which is a favourite technique of mine. Hopefully it should hold up pretty well throughout the year.

The front cover. This design is one of a whole bunch of variations I screenprinted a while back, when I was working with this image.

Here's the back cover, another variation on the theme; I don't see why the back cover has to match the front cover. You can see I tore the page edges on this side.

I printed the pages of this planner letterpress-style using metal type on a poster press. This particular press doesn't give you the cleanest print, but it does allow you to change things up easily (especially using magnetic furniture). That's how come every page has a slightly different arrangement of text and images.

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.

My Book

Hello all, and a Happy New Year to you. 2012 is a good number, amirite? It has a good feel to it. Nice solid name for this year. Some good stuff is going to happen in 2012.

Anyhow, I guess this is one of the first things I made in 2012. (Although I may have started this in 2011, these things take flippin' ages to put together.) It's a notebook that I made for myself. I wanted something sturdy, with lots of pages, to last me a long time. It's for my printmaking notes, so I intend to keep writing down information about printmaking techniques and referring back to them (provided my notes make sense in the first place).

I used a variety of different kinds of paper in here, but it's mostly a range of leftover paper and offcuts from printmaking - screenprints, linocuts etc. Some failed or damaged prints torn up and repurposed.

The spine cloth is made of something I printed a while ago onto scrap fabric. It's one of my linocut designs in white ink on pale blue.

Again, I kept the deckle on the outer edge of the papers.

The front is kind of a turquoise blue, the back is a darker blue. I don't see why the covers have to match.

The card covers over the book board are made from salvaged file folders. It's a good, hearty card. Got them from SCRAP, I think. (I love that place. Enough materials to keep you going forever, for like $1.50.)

The binding is your basic linen tape binding.

This elastic band sewn in to hold the book closed is made out of a hair band - super inexpensive. The page marker (very useful) is just an extra length of linen tape; I sewed it into the spine cloth to keep it secure.

So there you go, one book made. I am pretty pleased with it - it may be my best yet, and I think it will suit me well for writing my notes.

Weddings!!

I've been asked to make the save-the-date cards and invitations for the wedding of two very good friends of mine, so I've been doing a bit of research on what kind of wedding stuff is out there. After spending hours and hours looking through invitations and so on produced by all kinds of fancy letterpress and design places, I have come to this conclusion: most of it is rubbish. I saw too many unimaginative scroll designs, too much terrible calligraphy, and a lot of pretentious cutesy little details.

I think I had better just come up with something true to what I can print well and what I'd like to make, and something that would suit the lovely couple. Having said that I found a few things that I liked the look of, or used a design element that I would quite like to employ. I'm going to post some of those here.

This is Foreshadow Press. I sort of like the the curved corners of the cards, the bright colours, and the white text and design on the white background.

This is Foreshadow Press also. That pale orange on cream is not bad.

This is Wk Studio. Not a wedding invite, obviously.

Ha! Also not a wedding invite. Give this to a friend on their birthday if you want them to feel vaguely icky. WK Studio. I like the strong text over the paler but still legible image printed under.

This was the most hipsterish wedding ever, but I kind of love the invite. I am not too keen on san serif fonts for this purpose, though. This is Wiley Valentine, featured on Once Wed.

I agree, silkscreen and letterpress would be great together! Or a linocut and letterpress, alternatively. The slightly less regimented line of the hand-drawn/cut image vs. letterpress for a cleaner feel, retaining some personality. Special = a promising new thing starting up in Portland.

I can't really remember why I put this one in. I guess because he was from New York and she was from Toronto and they lived in London, or something, so the design included a famous building from each. Kind of cute. This is just too much stuff they are sending out, though. Pantry Press.

I include this one because I like the torn edges. I think it would be quite neat to hand-tear all the edges, although that would preclude using cardstock - probably a cream Rives BFK would look nice, and of course be great for a linocut image. Oblation Press, a shop based in Portland.

Put a bird on it! But this has three colours, which I think would be quite nice; I'd like to do two colours on the design, and a different coloured envelope. Oh, this also has a tree - an awful lot of invitations have a tree on them. By Kyle Van Horn.

This has the paler blue under the text and another image, which is quite nice. Plus a nice serif font, and something a bit personal to the couple (rather than a tree or some squiggles). Keegan Meegan, based in Portland. These guys are awesome, I have one of their prints.

I love the two colours here. This is Julia Rothman for her own wedding, she's a pretty cool illustrator and pattern designer.

Kinda cute. I guess the couple met in elementary school, so it's a school theme. Hammerpress, Remington design.

This is Hammerpress too. Usually I wouldn't be keen on this sort of thing, but being Hammerpress it's very well done.

This one's from Dutch Door Press. Kinda love those colours - the pale gold and the teal. Another thing I like: when there's a two colour design, and the names are picked out in a different colour from the rest of the text. Subtle, but underlines the important bit of the invite.

I am a sucker for that colourful butcher's twine stuff. I know it is very fashionable crafty right now, but it still looks cool. Printing on brown card is another thing I like to do - a screenprint of a lighter colour on brown can be pretty sweet. This is Little Miss Press, from a feature on Design Sponge.

Kinda cute, thinking outside the box a little bit. A wedding in a greenhouse, via Design Sponge again.

Not sure what I put this one in for. Caitlin Harris.

Yellow Owl. Very nice woodcut stuff, and nice use of white.

Yellow Owl. This one is hand-coloured, which is something I could do. I know it might seem like hand-colouring 100 cards is a daft thing to do, but that's the kind of thing I enjoy as an artist.

Yellow Owl. This one has a hand-printed look to it, which again is an option for me. That might be an even dafter thing to do, though.

It folds out! So fancy. Brown envelopes are an idea, too. Yellow Owl.

A good job with hand-lettering, here. And yeah, a good use of the two colours, with white effectively acting as their third colour. I guess this couple really like their dog. Yellow Owl.

This invite was printed on vintage hankies, so each one is unique! Pretty fun idea. Bird and Banner.

Nice use of hand lettering, but imagine it not on blue - it might look a bit rubbish. So a good use of colour. Bird and Banner.

Nice idea, with the sewing. Bird and Banner.

See here's what I mean about the names being picked out in a colour from the accompanying design. Not really so keen on fuchsia and grass green together, but there you go. This is by 9 Spot Monk.

I like this one because it's a simple, nice, straight to the point save-the-date card. Nothing pretentious. 9 Spot Monk.

One last thing: the place I intern at sometimes, EMprint Press, has a really nice portfolio of wedding invites.