[image description: 3 photos of a combination letterpress & hand-inked illustration print, and a photo of the forme of handset type used to print the letterpress elements. the illustration is of a person on a black background, their curly hair backlit, wearing a wide-shouldered and wide-lapeled jacket and trousers. the motion of their dangling earring and bent knees imply a snapshot of dancing. The letterpress printed element is the pattern on the jacket and pants: a decorative border that’s simply blocks of fine lines, arranged in a slightly randomized combination of concentric squares, encircling and intersecting with each other, some printed in silver and some in pink. over that are a few plain, long lines of cyan, and scattered over that is a scattering of paler cyan boxes. This pattern is continuous and flatly applied across all the fabric in the illustration: it doesn’t bend or break across seam lines, folds, or across lines between the jacket and the pants. the forme of handset lead type is an assemblage of relief printing pieces, with different types of pieces to turn corners, align different directions, or fill negative space with no printing surface. each color in the print requires a different arrangement of pieces, assembled and then disassembled to reclaim the pieces for use in a different forme. end description.]
it is difficult for me to remember that i did this one desPITE the fact i haven’t even finished inking the whole edition yet because i uuuh finished inking exactly three of them just in time to include footage of the whole process for a presentation about these combination prints for the Book Arts Guild—and then diverted completely to finish editing the presentation—and now that that’s posted i am finally, slowly finishing inks on the rest in downtime. haha jk what’s downtime i am not free i am simply avoiding important emails
there’s a lot more info in that video about process & some thoughts about this one in particular! but in brief, i watched a recording of the Purple Rain concert tour, which i don’t pretend to know much about but my gaydar went haywire about Wendy Melvoin; im a huge sucker for big sparkly blocks of a matching suit set; pink & blue bring joy to my color cones, etc.
the whole presentation is here; the Q&A afterward from the meeting wasn’t recorded (sorry, i didn’t know that’s how it was done ahead of time) but my askbox is always open for questions about printing process! i mean it’s just open. but i only know important stuff about printing.
edition available on etsy
areudirty
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