[video description: process recording of a relief print done with a combination of pressure printing and handset type. in pressure printing, the plate which carries the ink and presses it into the sheet is perfectly flat, with no relief. instead there a variable-depth "plate", in this case built by layering multiple pieces of hand-cut paper, which is made thicker in select areas so that the sheet hits the flat ink plate with extra pressure and thus transfers a deeper area of color. it allows for multiple densities of ink transfer in a single pass, and makes for a fuzzy-edged, sort of ghostly impression of the plate image. with handset type, every letter, image, or icon, and all the spaces in between, are individual pieces cast in metal, assembled into a rectilinear arrangement. in this case the rectilinear form is used to print the spots on a panther, in a randomized pattern and on the irregular silhouette of its body. In order to print the rectangular type in an irregular area, a mask is cut into acetate that protects the print from being contacted by the type outside the silhouette of the panther. every time the press opens, a sheet is placed in the press and the protective mask lays over the sheet as the press closes, preventing the type from transferring ink outside the mask opening. end description.]
finished print
there were so many parts of this print that were messier than i'm used to fs;dfdjf
all the tone plate/pressure print passes got my hands unavoidably covered in ink, there's set off on the back sides of so many of these sheets that i normally wouldn't tolerate, i added extra drying agent to the black and they had to air dry for days anyway, e t c . it did certainly become freeing after a bit! and i know many people will be like. this is what you think freedom in printmaking is. this. LISTEN, baby steps. give me time.
[image description: photos of a letterpress printed broadside of a poem by a pediatric patient, as part of the yearly publication of poetry from the Writer’s in the Schools Program at Seattle Children’s Hospital. This poem is called Black Panther, the Night Hunter. It illustrates the black panther as if in low light, with a combination of fuzzy-edged, textured pressure printing and handset type for the panther's spots. the text and panther's eye are printed in metallic silver. full text under the cut. end description.]
WIP
done with this year's Words of Courage broadside! WoC is a yearly publication of poetry broadsides written by patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and designed, printed, and bound into portfolios by local letterpress & book artists. this year’s whole edition will be scanned and posted there in a couple weeks & previous years are always there to see!
this one was pretty nerve wracking for me because i did a lot of things i'm not really used to but at end i think it's good! and feedback has been positive so i'm working on believing it. i can say with certainty that i loved this poem the instant i saw it, and i did my best to make a panther that matched it. fearless, cool, tangible but not tame.
All the background is basically a series of tone plates (blank lino block) and a single multi-layer pressure plate pass (and a touch plate to deepen the dark background under the poem). The poem & the eye are handset type printed in silver, and the panther's spots are a whole bunch of handset pieces masked off to trap to the silhouette of the panther from the pressure print.
pressure printing is extremely simple as a process but i guess how i would say it is. my comfort zone is usually complex but reliable processes. not a huge fan of surprises in the output. control freak behavior. and the concession to control that i made was, basically, i planned it so all the tone plates and pressure printing went on first and if it wasn't layering the way i wanted, or wasn't getting the effect of low-light nighttime values that i wanted, i could ripcord out and pivot to a more known quantity without losing any good printing that i'd already done. and if the gray values just weren't adding up be to dark enough I could also just keep adding tone plate passes until i achieved sufficient contrast for the silver, as much of a pain as that would've been.
there was in fact about a week where i thought i would just have re-do the whole composition so that the fuzzy pressure print, the panther, etc., was all confined to a discrete box on one side of the sheet, and i would have to print black on clean white for the text. i just never wanted the poem to disappear in the mid value ranges—BUT a fellow printer friend and several other people really encouraged me to go with it, just push the darkness on the left as much as i could and do the touch plate and such. i'm glad i listened because flooding the whole sheet really is the way to make the panther seem unconfined, like it could approach you. in another context i also wouldn't have questioned the way the silver text can disappear at some angles, and pops out with shine at others; camouflage is completely appropriate. I just got anxious because the poet & their poem is obviously the most important part of this project in particular, but i regained confidence in it as an appropriate text treatment the closer it got to being finished.
i think i had the absolute least trust in the process when all the background was printed, and the poem, and the colophon, and i just thought, oh no, this isn't going to be anything :( but then i put that big shiny eye on and suddenly i knew it was going to be good :) still had the spots left to print but that's the one thing i've practiced a lot and i could envision it clearly. that was of course the real source of my anxiety during the whole thing. nothing technically out of the ordinary here, but i'm not practiced in envisioning so much variable texture, and i have little confidence in my taste with textural ranges. what if i simply don't know what Good looks like?? perhaps. must do it first to learn it, nerves included. Can't always be panthers.
Black Panther, the Night Hunter
If I were an animal
I'd be a black panther.
Sometimes, I'd be crazy
and run around.
Sometimes, I'd growl
if I saw a monster or goblin.
I'd be friends with lions,
tigers, and cheetahs.
I'd eat meat
many times a day,
like walruses.
I'd be scared of nothing.
Nothing.
three pages from a pretty piece of ephemera: programme printed by george w. jones—intaglio cover, title page, menu.* set throughout in linotype garamond #3. jones was consultant to the british branch of mergenthaler linotype & consequently expert in obtaining excellent composition from the machine—not an easy thing, especially with italic. for more info on garamond #3 & the garamond revival in general vide ‹bounded in a nutshell›.
* «Printed by Bro. George W. Jones at The Sign of the Dolphin in Gough Square | Fleet Street, London, E. C. 4»
[video description: process video for assembling a small, paper kaleidoscope-alike. one side of the flat paper was printed with overlapping, colorful patterns. The sheet is die cut and folded into a 1.5-inch hexagonal column, patterns all on the inside. One end of the column has an aperture covered in translucent vellum, printed with very very small type; the other side of the column folds into a little paper shelf and opening, and a small magnifying lens is dropped inside. Looking through the lens, the 3 1/2 pt. type reads "kalos eidos / beautiful form / in infinite variety”, and the inside of the column imitates the repeating, rotating patterns of a kaleidoscope. end description.]
etsy
wip 1 : wip 2
love to make weird specific box so so much. i don't get to do it for job -job very often, prototyping takes so long and designing a completely custom enclosure that actually fits can get really expensive, etc., so mostly if i want to do it i have to think of my own excuse. but here!! an excuse. and you know i talk a lot about what my mom taught me and that makes sense but both of my parents are letterpress people, on my dad's side since my great-grandfather. and weird specific box, i learned to love that all from him.
struggled to film the inside of this guy skldfj BUT it's basically exactly what I hoped! it's odd, my childhood memory of our little kaleidoscope definitely featured this bold green but i checked while I was prototyping, that kaleidoscope has no green at all. red and blue and orange and even lavender but no green. i went with green anyway, i think it works well for the 3-color split I have here, but what a strange revision to have made in my head.
now that I have used the 3 1/2 pt type for something, finally unwrapping it from its original ATF packaging, i have to admit that i should concede to some kind of tacklebox/bead box system to distribute it. i don't love it but it simply won't be safe rattling around in a proper case, and even tweezers don't make it reasonable to set from a galley. ah well. one anomaly in the system won't kill me i guess.
[video description: process recording for a small paper book art, letterpress printed. The first steps are to print several repeating patterns, chaotically overlapped with three designs in bright red, green, and blue, to cover most of the paper. Each pass of the patterns are printed from handset type, which are individual pieces of relief designs cast in lead that can be assembled and reassembled into various overlapping positions. The forms of assembled type go into clamshell presses, which open and close on a hinge, with the relief impression held on one arm of the V and the paper held with pins in the other arm. Every time the press opens a printed sheet is removed and replaced with a new sheet by hand, and every time the press closes the relief matrix is pressed into the sheet to transfer the print. another element of the book art involves a small amount of text set in very tiny type, printed on vellum: "kalos eidos / beautiful form / in infinite variety" end description.]
wip 1
been waiting for actual YEARS to find a purpose for the 3 1/2 pt. type :)
there's this phenomenon i've noticed on youtube which i dub "man math" which is when men STEM-ify hobbies/activities/art forms in order to make them more masculine. it's very noticeable in the cooking video sphere where there's an endless stream of videos made by men along the lines of "the SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN best way to cook an egg" (and dgmw, i watch them and find them helpful, but the observation stands), but i notice it also in the way men approach ceramics (a lot of focus on mold-making and slip-casting to perfection, basically reinventing one man mass-production rather than play and discovery), tailoring/sewing/knitting/textile art, gardening and other nature-oriented hobbies, interior decor, furniture making and woodworking, journaling/planning/productivity, even drawing and painting, there's always some man math angle to it that although interesting it often strikes me as some sort of overcompensation to move away from the inherent vulnerability that comes with art making and once you notice it it's literally everywhere
[image description: photos of an 8x10 letterpress print, made from linoleum block and handset type. "take from our mouths and risk a hand," is the only text, with an illustration of a camel with its mouth wide open and teeth towards the viewer. The camel is primarily red, but there's a pale lavender copy of the camel printed underneath, registered perfectly under the prominent incisors and rotated out of register from there. the further from the teeth, towards the eye, the more the two colors diverge, like focus blurring, or motion. end description.]
etsy
"[Camels] are primarily herbivorous."
8x10 inches, printed on Rosaspina ivory. edition of 44. for every print sold, i donate 20$ to local food banks (Seattle area). feel free to message me if you'd like further details about donation destinations!
[video description: process video of making a small letterpress print from handset type. "Is this the worst day of my life or did I only eat half a banana for breakfast this morning" is the text, with a decorative rendering of a balance scale beneath. on the light end of the balance scale is a pile of curse symbols; on the heavy end of the weight is a banana. each element of the print was assembled from handset type, relief letters and images cast in lead and assembled one piece at at time. the balance scale is built from pieces intended as decorative brackets and borders. end description.]
etsy
i feel like i haven't done something like this in a while, just a quick fun game with type?? messing around. goofin. the moon is a banana now.
"Although it is not human, the printing press is a sensitive perceptual instrument: after all, it must sense the image on the matrix in order to print it. …This is much closer to a tactile mode of perception than a visual one. Indeed, although the printing press is used for the production of visual art, it is not itself an optical instrument. If you want to print a visual image, you must first convert it into something that can be felt: the image must be translated into a pattern of grooves, ridges, or adhesions. The printmaking process is akin to an act of communication with an alien that has no eyes.
"And printmaking is nonoptical in another sense: the moment of printing is radically invisible. The actual formation of the print occurs in a tight, unobservable space. The print is made darkly: what happens there happens between the matrix and the ink and the support; no one can watch it; no one can surveil it. This helps explain the mystique of the 'pull' in printmaking: that moment when the image is peeled away from the matrix, revealing it to the eye and to the air for the first time. …Now we can back up and get a look at it. But when we do, we should not forget that we are always looking at a recording of an event that occurred beyond the range of looking."
Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Jennifer L. Roberts, 2024
Highly recommend this book to anybody but definitely printers/printmakers!! in fact i have been a broken record about it to every print person i know since i read it. it's a lot about incorporating technical aspects & print-specific physical processes (which are frequently downplayed or dismissed as low-art, reproductive, or commercial elements of printmaking) into analysis of fine art printmaking. a super interesting topic to me personally and seen from a viewpoint such that there's many passages in it where i had to stop and think, i work with these tools every day, quite commercially, and i've never thought about it that way before. this is only one of many examples. been turning them around in my brain ever since.
[video description: process recording of letterpress printing foldover notecards with a linoleum block illustration. The notecard is also perforated so that a section can be popped out and folded into a small, petaled lantern. some of the passes are printed on a flatbed press, which lays the carved relief block flat in the bed and rolls the paper over the surface with a cylinder to impress the image. some passes use a clamshell-type press which opens and closes on a hinge, with the relief impression held on one arm of the V and the sheet held with pins in the other arm. Every time the press opens a printed card is removed and replaced with a new card by hand, and every time the press closes the relief matrix is press into the sheet to transfer the print. end description.]
linocuts by Lauren Nishizaki for Marpac Construction
[image description: photos of a letterpress-printed playing card deck based on the jokers from Balatro. It's a standard 52-card deck, but the face of every card is a unique cut-out from a larger print, a wallpaper of small illustrations for each of the 145 main joker designs, such that somewhere in the deck a reference to each joker appears at least once. The pips and ranks are printed plainly on top, so as not to cover too much of the backdrop. The actual jokers of the deck are the 5 legendary jokers. The original large print with the pattern of icons was printed from a hand-carved linoleum block, where each image is carved in relief so that the raised image can receive ink, then press the ink into the paper surface. end description.]
🎉🎉 DB 2025 approaches 🎉🎉 there are as usual many many cool things in the Craft-Along this year 🎉🎉 this Balatro card deck in particular is up for giveaway sometime from 6 pm-12 PST on Monday, Nov 17th 🎉🎉 all auctions, giveaways, & donations raise money for Child's Play charity 🎉🎉
wip 1 : wip 2 : wip 3 : wip 4 : wip 5 : wip 6
I keep saying I don’t mean to become the card deck person, but. How could I resist this. Don’t ask me how many hours I’ve played, I don’t look at the counter for my health.
i had some big smarty pants ideas about how to do this to start with and i threw all those out!! not for any great reason, i just didn't like the sketches that came of it when i planned on some sort of. permutation-centric linoblock tetris situation. big ol 10x16 inch wallpaper of icons it turned out to be, brute-force stupid, simply carve until your hand falls off. i'll save the tetris idea for another time.
ranks & pips i made very simple. there's only a few things in my type collection that have connective tissue with any of the in-game text, but Century Schoolbook has similarities to the JOKER tag itself and it's clean, not distracting & easy to read small in the corners. I didn't want to cover up too much in the center either, but it needs some character if it's just going to be unaccompanied symbols. picked out Bradley, which has a similar weight and curvature to my linocut and also just a bit of medieval jester flavor. i believe this is also the first time I've actually gotten to use the Bradley, which is one of a couple of founts that came from my great-grandfather's shop on my dad's side.
being honest i don't really like playing with the high-contrast colors, they're actually harder for me to read X) BUT as a whole object they’re very pretty, they were very fun to print, and it felt very necessary in order to, A, get a wider range of icons printed in an appropriate color for their original design, & B, make each unique arrangement of icons easier to distinguish from each other.
also had first thoughts about a box with some sort of interchangeable lid that would do all the different unlockable decks, but i nixed that for time and also because it just got messy. Went with the straightforward red default deck for the card backs, especially so that the presentation in the box is all blue, black & red as the home screen.
by far the most reasonable printing order i've ever had the opportunity to do for a card deck, most reliable registration asks, least chance of loss at a critical point, etc. other decks i've done couldn't have been done that way for Reasons, but i have a project i've been turning over in my head for years that i hope can be done similarly.
still learning more ways this kind of thing can be designed! that's pretty incredible i think, card decks are such a cool unfolding kind of problem. might be grabbed by another type of deck when proposals come around for next year, or maybe i'll finally be pulled harder in some kind of weird book direction. i will not be steering.
Hello. I am absolutely fascinated by the world of printmaking. I have a lot of questions, and I wonder if you have written them up before, but tumblr search is bad and none of your links seemed to lead to these.
1. This seems to be your private business? Is that so? Or is this a shared business/you’re an employee?
2. How did this business get started? How did you source all the equipment? What were the startup costs?
3. What sorts of end results do you find get ordered most?
4. Do you have any process information centrally documented in a nicer place than tumblr that I can refer to in order to study this?
5. Do you have any resources that are helpful to you? Communities, forums, websites, blogs, art guilds, consortiums, organizations, societies, whatever?
Printmaking as a repairable, sustainable, low-impact/footprint, human scale, tangible technology and method for publishing and information and art dissemination/proliferation is a strong interest and value of mine. I intend to study it in college, and help preserve any and all methods of analog printmaking. I’d love to establish a print shop local to me, as there are none where I am.
Thank you so much for sharing your videos and your work online! And thank you for your time.
Hello!! So happy to hear you've been afflicted with the printmaking obsession. It holds such a wide range of creative possibilities! but it's also really very small and niche in the world, which i think is part of why the communities of printers & artists I've seen have always been really welcoming.
i have sort of answered a little bit of this before in the an sword tag but i never did put that in the header and I have no idea why! it's up there now. anyway. i'll also say, all my answers are going to be letterpress-specific, since that's primarily what i do, but there's a whole lot more sub-disciplines out there under printmaking that encapsulate similar principles as repairable/salvaged equipment, low-impact production, independent publishing history, etc. college is a great time to explore all those options, although worth mentioning, where you go to school might be extremely determinant on what printing types are available to learn! my understanding is lots of colleges would've had their equipment donated by a printer or small publisher, or maybe they bought things in lots from estate sales; the curriculum could be determined by what equipment they have to work on, as well as the experience of the faculty, which are sometimes not quite the same. like, i went to Whitman and i have no complaints about the art department faculty! they taught me a ton of really valuable things from their experience that expanded my ability to make art but they all had very different training than the vanity publisher that donated his whole shop to their printmaking department, you know what i mean? so i also learned a lot of stuff at home relevant to job-printing that just wasn't in the same wheelhouse as any of my teachers. anyway all that to say you can probably check out what is actually living in a school's printmaking department and bios of its faculty to get some clues as to what kinds of process/production will be best supported there.
1: cyclesprefect is my personal imprint name, which i used to use more and still use for a handful of projects that are technically separate from my day-job letterpress work, but mostly it's just useful here as a slightly less professional account than my letterpress-as-day-job things which are primarily on instagram as Day Moon Press. Day Moon Press is the family business, which my mother ran from '76 until she had to retire around 2016. technically it's just me doing all of it these days, but both my parents are still pretty involved one way or another.
2: unfortunately by the family business nature i do not have any useful answers for you on sourcing/startup costs. my mother bought her first press in '75 and it was an extremely different market for equipment back then—most commercial print shops were of the opinion that letterpress was dying (and it was pretty financially inviable as a sole operation for a good 20 years there) and they were dumping the equipment or recycling the metal for $$. she got the big clamshell C&P that i still use all the time for………$75 plus the effort of moving it herself because that's what the guy would've gotten for recycling the cast iron body. the majority of the type collection came from one shop that was liquidating their letterpress department, i believe the guy pointed to two pillars in the warehouse and said, take everything between here and here—could've been as many as 400 founts—for $2000. these days the standing clamshell type of presses are more like $1500-5000 depending on size & condition, and you're still getting it moved it yourself. flatbed presses, which are more in demand as ideal tools for introductory classes, posters, and certain kinds of printmaking, i've seen those listed at anywhere between 5 and 15k. i mean i have questions for the people listing some of these things at over 10k, but it's pretty normal.
but like. this is still not a stable industry in any way yknow. sometimes a person is just selling a whole shop from storage for $4000?? and sometimes people need more space in their garage shop and they just list free presses for pickup. vet at your own risk obviously but. i guess in that way it's still the same as the 70s: keep an eye out for what's available local to you, and people are out there still trying to pass down the equipment to somebody who's going to use it rather than scrap it.
i will also say that at least where i am (seattle) by far the most expensive thing is the real estate to house the equipment. especially if you're interested in being able to work with handset type (which to be clear i recommend highly!! all the low-impact, tangible qualities, handset type is a prime example of those principles), all the tools that go into it can take up a bit more room than lots of other art material. there are definitely options for small, tabletop-size clamshells that can be just a few hundred dollars, but fully refurbished ones can top 1k too. not seeing a lot of tabletop flatbed/proofing presses out there right now, but vandercook no. 0s or similar could be good for a smaller studio as well. anyway something garage-sized or even a second-bedroom sized studio is absolutely workable, you don't need hundreds of square footage to do really really cool stuff, but in big cities it is definitely a hurdle just finding the space to utilize the equipment you find. but i also think that's generally what a lot of printers do anyway: work backwards from the equipment they find to a process that works for them. there's a lot of possibilities in any one press type, you just gotta explore what they're capable of.
if you can find any kind of community print studio around you i've seen that work well for people getting started—work with what they have for a while, get comfortable with a couple kinds of printing, take some stuff for a test drive, and then do more targeted searching for equipment so that you only need to find space for what you really want to use.
3. a lot of custom stuff i do is stationery, professional or personal—lots of business cards/letterhead/etc. for small local businesses, a bunch of wedding invitations, sometimes personalized notecards. i also do custom art prints/poetry broadsides, often for some kind of event/anniversary, like an excerpt from a wedding song for an anniversary type of thing, or very small (1-10 copies usually) editions of hand-bound books, typically where the author comes to me and needs a couple copies for friends/family. i also do retail notecards/prints/small books, but tbh i don't spend the time to make that contribute to the business model most of the year. holiday season i go to as many art markets as i can and it really does help, but there's other printers out there making their whole living off retail/wholesale of their designs and that's not me. i'm way more invested in making time for the custom projects.
4. this is the closest i get to centralized, unfortunately :( i'm happy to answer specific questions about printing process or any wips i post, but i don't really try to make it like, generally educational. most ways of learning in print are i think very case-specific anyway, dictated by the materials/equipment available and the desired end results. once there's a skeleton of tools and subject matter, it's a lot easier to figure out what information is important.
5. there's definitely a strong online community of printers/printmakers! partly because we're a small group scattered all over, partly because exchange of information is pretty central to the survival of the craft. Briar Press is where those classified links come from, it's a pretty active place not just for equipment sales but also general discussion and they've got a specific category for beginners in letterpress. i was just dinking around on there looking for those classifieds and bumped into interesting stuff all on accident. drinking milk to prevent lead poisoning used to be a thing?? it doesn't work, don't try that, but apparently that used to be shop policy in some places. anyway.
unfortunately instagram is the social media platform i find most active with print community, but ah well. chances are there's some group local to you that you could link up with for in-person type things, even if you have to expand the definition of printing to more disciplines (engraving, intaglio, riso, etc) to get a cluster going. you can also expand your search to orgs around book arts, you'll find a lot of printmakers/printer types there too. i keep meaning to go to an in-person Seattle Print Arts event but i always forget to make the time. PiP has a physical location again but they're keeping some of their remote programming, i think mostly shop talks. again depends where you are/if you can travel much, but look for any Wayzgoose events near you if you want to find people in person! they're like a printer-specific type of event, usually these days they're set up like conferences, with talks & workshops and equipment swaps and probably some vending. you meet tons of people there that all have their own niche interests within print, it's great. there's a couple regular/large ones in California, there's two in washington state that i go to often, i'm sure there's more all over. don't ask me about hamilton wayzgoose, i don't know anything more than what other people are posting
last thing on resource gathering, can't recommend enough just getting a couple old books. even regular old original manuals for specific types of equipment, which you can frequently find somewhere on archive.org, or scanned & logged on a janky-looking website some old guy (affectionate) posted 20-30 years ago. antiquarian book fairs, antique shops? poke around and you might find something quite dry and extremely useful about how printing was done 50-100 years ago. at a book fair ages ago my parents got this pair of little "pocket" books that are way too fucking thick to fit in a pocket that were printed in the 1890s, and it's just this one printer in England talking about how to set up your print business, how much to pay what kind of workers, what to charge for this kind of work, how to lay out your type cases when some of your employees probably can't read, etc. they're SO cool.
that's was a lot and i still probably missed something or forgot something important!! but yeah the ask box is always open, im just slow because i say too many words. have fun exploring the medium & good luck finding your print people, i know they're out there!
[Image description: two sheets from a run of a multi-color block print, with only the first pass in green printed. On one sheet the color green is noticeably less bright and saturated a shade than the other. End description.]
See sometimes you printed too late in the day yesterday and the light was not good enough to tell that the green was too bright although you kind of suspected it might be so you just left the block in the press to look at in the morning and said yup that sure is too bright, but you know how to fix this, and it’s just overprinting pastel black straight out of the can, and look at that edge, and away from gripper as well :D no one will ever knowwww
[video description: recording of a dog in a print shop who loves to chew paper, so we have to teach her that it's a special, rationed treat that she shouldn't steal from the recycling bin. when i hand her a sanctioned piece of card stock she snatches it, takes it back to her favorite rug, and tears it to pieces. end description.]
i get her so many chew toys but she craves only chipboard
