Category Archives: printing

Tiny Pine Scones

Today is Sunday. Often on Sunday, I like to not work… to reflect and such. Particularly I like to bake.  And lately I have been baking scones for the weekday breakfast treat…. just a little something for the belly in the morning that is already prepped and only needs to be heated a dash… you know. It’s hard to get out of bed these winter mornings. It’s easier to get out of bed when your breakfast is nearly ready already.

Well, today as I was starting to bake, I thought “there must be some pretty close similarities between printing and baking since I love the processes s much.” I set out to find out how they are the same. 

scones

The first thing is that these days, I start baking and printing projects on the computer. For baking, I like to look up a recipe on epicurious.com because I am not limited to what books or magazines I have here. The information super highway works really well for recipes! Today was the first time I have used my iphone in the kitchen. That was pretty funny…. flour on my fingers scrolling down to see what was next…. good thing I bought that screen protector! 

For letterpress the typesetting and artwork phase is all done in Illustrator and Photoshop. Don’t get me wrong, I like to be old school and all, but typesetting machines are big and require so much space and they melt down lead and there for some reason I don’t want lead all over my hands and everywhere. The true old old school method is handset type – but here again is a space situation. Fonts take up a LOT less space in the hard drive than little letters in all the different sizes and styles would take up in my studio!

Another similarity is the idea of substituting but knowing when and where. Baking is a chemical process – you can’t substitute self rising flour for cake flour. It WON”T work. But you can substitute yogurt for buttermilk and butter for margarine. Much the same in printing when mixing inks… Once I didn’t have a can of rhodamine red ink. – it’s like a bright pinky purple – and a ink recipe called for it. I examined the color, took a chance and substituted florescent pink and rubine red instead. The color was perfect. (the question is why did I have a can of florescent pink and not rhodamine red?!!)

Is this boring? I could go on all day. I can draw some more comparisons another day but let’s do one contrast for now….

You can’t eat the printed paper scone. 

Though I do have a source for vegetable paper and probably soy ink is even vegan??!? I’ll have to look into that… but there is hope!

Vintage Stamps have Vintage Glue

stamps and envelopes and handsToday I had a project which called for vintage postage for the envelopes. It’s my favorite time of the design process. 

I get all stamp happy and pick out bunches to choose from and agonize over which ones are best suited in color, shape, value and theme. It’s a puzzle and I get to solve it. 

I design these stamp configurations with love, not logic, and then when it comes time to actually assemble them… Well, that’s when it gets interesting. Or when I get anxious. 

Everyone thinks that the final assembly of an invitation, the “stuff stamp and seal” is really fast and just the final bit of getting out the mail. But I am here to tell you today, friends, that one needs to allow a good amount of time for this process. Even if there is one stamp…. and especially if there are 10

 

bunches of stamps10 NON self-adhesive vintage stamps with vintage glue. That’s what today’s assignment was. Fortunately I have a crazy friend, Joanna, who LOVES sticking stamps. We had our mock-up and set out to stamp 130 envelopes – that’s 1300 individual stamps, if you want me to do the math for you. Together, it took us about 3 1/2 hours (so it would have been an entire day if it were just me and that doesn’t even include the sealing phase). She is typically employed as an illustrator/conceptual artist on feature films and I can’t afford that kind of help… but fortunately, she works for me in exchange for food… and then bought her own lunch! That’s how much she LOVES applying postage!

joanna with the finished product

joanna with the finished product

It is actually quite zen when you get into it. And only once in awhile did we go crazy and stick the same stamp on twice. and sometimes your fingers get coated in vintage glue. And then you are smiling cause you were smart enough to not lick the stamps. Do you know when they made 3 cent stamps? Well, they made them for a bunch of years, but it was awhile ago… and they don’t taste good.

Anyways… here are some photos. And no, I am not telling you where I get them. That’s my little secret……

Lori D is cool.

I got back from the holidays in Southwest Virginia and in my mail box was a familiar envelope with familar handwriting. I was really excited cause it was heavy and that meant there was a prize inside….. 

loridart

Lori D had sent me some silkscreen postcards that she made on the Print Gocco. She is brave for using that little machine for many reasons… Mostly because they can be very very tricky, but also because it’s nearly impossible to get the supplies anymore (they are from Japan and don’t have distribution, I don’t think…) She did two colors on one screen with this print, which is an amazing part of the Gocco… The little tricks. and it is small for small paper projects. OOH!! You Gocco!

Chipboard is cool, her inks are cool, her drawing is ultra cool. What else is there to say. Lori D is cool and I am so happy to receive such a wonderful present. (you just wait til I post the painting she did of my family. then you will really know how awesome this lady is!)

Since she sent me 5 of them, I get to give them away. But that is going to be a tricky decision because they are so precious… I guess having that it is a good problem to have… who to give the pretty cards to??

Oh, and they were for Happy Solstice. Which is also very cool. truly.

Thank you Lori D!!!

http://www.lori-d.com/

Epson Stylus Photo R1900 – Steppy

Ok. it’s fairly ridiculous that I spent $500 on a photo printer when I NEVER print photos. I never use glossy stock. I rarely print anything as big as 11×17. BUT I got a discount and I got this (not so) little guy. We’ll call him Stepper. 

Stepper and I weren’t friends right away. I think he was a little grumpy that I hold on to the smaller and old old old 5400 under the desk. That little guy is a grandpa but still a work horse… 

Anyways, I wasn’t very friendly to little Steppy at first because I couldn’t get him to print nicely like I saw in the demonstration. I used to print from Illustrator because I like the vectors but the prints kept coming out jagged and weird… especially the type. One day, I tried printing from Photoshop and the crazy problem wasn’t there. At that moment, I developed a BIG crush on Steppy. 

Now we are best friends. He prints straighter and with amazing color (and he should cause he has 8 or so different cartridges in there – 2 blacks, even) and he is fast and accurate and I know that he only gets grumpy when I feed him crazy papers – but we work through it and work together. Now I am in love with him… We are still getting to know each other but I have a feeling this is going to be a great relationship.

Why am I always personifying printers? hmmmmmmm……

A shout out in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker… What???!!!

This summer my little brother Oscar asked me to print tickets letterpress for a small concert he was putting together with his band, Thomas A. Minor and the Picket Line, in Kentucky. Because Bonnie Prince Billy, our good friend and patron, would be the headliner, they were sure to sell out like lightning and he reckoned that if they were printed letterpress then counterfeiting would be highly unlikely. So I obliged him.

Funtown Ticket

Funtown Ticket

It was really a bit secretive… when he gave me the wording, he didn’t even put a location on the ticket. I insisted that he needed to tell the audience what state they would be traveling to, at the very least… I mean, this wasn’t Charlie Sheen’s wedding (I did his invitations and there were all sorts of non-disclosures and I still don’t know where they got married! There wasn’t even a time on his invitations).

My other favorite part was “The Rules” on the back. I printed those on my laser so I didn’t need to dent the card twice. Since when did rules deserve such fine printing?? On the front of the ticket were the most essential restrictions. “No beer, alcohol or drugs” – only a hillbilly would not consider “beer” as a type of “alcohol”. (I can say that because I am a hillbilly.)

Anyways, those things were really not possible to fake. I put them on discontinued 100% recycled leftovers from a postcard I did for David Pajo years ago. And they had a deep clean impression with super thin type.

However, the point of this story is as follows: sometimes work one does is barely noticed at the time… maybe done for free… given with love and no expectations to family and friends. I printed the tickets and then I got to go to the show. I had to pay for my flight from Los Angeles, but I got my favorite Bonnie Prince Billy song dedicated to me and sang so lovely and then I got an amazing shout out about my work. How exciting!

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/05/090105fa_fact_sanneh?currentPage=all

Here’s what K. said…

“They asked Oscar’s sister Jennifer, who lives in Los Angeles, to print the tickets on a letterpress. She made three hundred, and they quickly disappeared from Louisville shops, at ten dollars apiece.”