cyclesprefect press

etsy : instagram, sort of : view finished works only : ask me anything : q's a'd

[cyclesprefectpress]

[image description: photos of a small card printed letterpress from handset type, and the form of type used to print it. The text is a sort of flowchart of gentle anxiety management questions, full text under the cut. the back side of the card is printed with a floral pattern in completely transparent ink, no color, only texture. it's about the size of a business card. end description.]

I've never printed these quite the same way twice since I'm always using salvaged paper but i had some extra cute columbine floral offcuts for this run :)

full text:

Is this a useful thought? What is its purpose?

Is this worry truly a problem?

Is this thought going to help me solve this problem?

Is now the time to worry? Do I have the time? Do I have the energy? When will I know it's time to stop worrying?

[cyclesprefectpress]

[image description: photos of several hardcover blank books, with various combinations of plain bookcloth and patterned endsheets, or patterned bookcloth made from quilting fabric. individual descriptions in alt text. end description.]

Etsy

making books is so stupid fun, i need to think of specific project i want to make in a small edition. i don't need to make more right now and it's genuinely distracting that i'd like to be but there's other work to be doing first slkdfkdj

[cyclesprefectpress]

[image description: photos of a letterpress print and one of the handset type forms used to print it. The print says "we have always been here & we always will be," in the blue, pink, and white stripes of the trans pride flag. end description.]

made some prints for giveaway at PiP during Seattle Pride tomorrow! Also so did so many resident printers, there's going to be so much good gay art up for grabs if you come visit :))

[cyclesprefectpress]

[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.

[cyclesprefectpress]

[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.

[cyclesprefectpress]

[duardius]

george w. jones

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»

[cyclesprefectpress]

[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.

[cyclesprefectpress]

[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 :)

[cyclesprefectpress]

venn diagram for book & box & cat toy.

[horreurscopes]

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

[horreurscopes]

[cyclesprefectpress]

[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!

[cyclesprefectpress]

[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.

goudy oldstyle & weiss initials

[cyclesprefectpress]

"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.

[cyclesprefectpress]

[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

[cyclesprefectpress]

every weather is shorts weather when you’re about to do 1500 impressions on the treadle press

[cyclesprefectpress]

[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.