Pressure Printing

Pressure Printing collaborates with many of today's leading artists from the pop-surrealist, lowbrow and comic art movements, creating uniquely handmade and hand-printed editions, and presenting them in specially designed and hand-crafted portfolios and frames.

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Mean Girls Club: Original Six

Prolific and world-renowned Canadian painter and comic book creator Ryan Heshka is a long-time friend of Pressure Printing. For over ten years, we’d hoped to collaborate on a project with Ryan, but the time was never right.

Until now.

Pressure Printing is excited to offer you our first print collaboration with Ryan Heshka– Mean Girls Club: Original Six.

About a year ago, Ryan sent us a set of color separations– produced himself– for a brand-new Mean Girls Club print. For us, these color separations were so special because the final result would clearly reflect Ryan's distinct and personal vision of the project.

Mean Girls Club: Original Six is a two-color silkscreen print of deep black and a confection of vivid fluorescent pink. The fantastically voluptuous Mean Girls are shown working beneath a full moon, aided by their car's headlights, lowering their latest victim into a shallow grave. Silhouetted in the moon's orb, a vulture patiently waits. This lonely spot might be a go-to dumping ground for the victims of Mean Girls; the club's initials are carved into a nearby tree trunk.

The top of the print is debossed and in its deep drop shadow, the words MEAN GIRLS CLUB hilariously mimic old-timey collegiate club pennants, but this pennant represents a small, select club of gloriously vengeful women who exact punishment on the fools who dare cross any or all of them.

Ryan debuted the Mean Girls Club: Original Six print the weekend of May 12, 2018 at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. The print measures 24-1/8” X 10-1/2”. Each print in the edition of 100 is signed and hand-numbered by the artist.

Mean Girls Club: Original Six is available now from ryanheshka.com

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Daniel Martin Diaz’s “Eternal Universe”

I believe art is a reflection of ourselves, the story of humanity, and a quest to understand the physical and metaphysical world. As we try to understand our place in the universe, art can be an important part of the dialogue we can create and share with each other. In my work, I seek to reveal the mysterious with arcane imagery and techniques that make sense to me on a deep level that words cannot quantify. In “Eternal Universe,” there is an underlying dichotomy of the power of technology and our quantum connection to it and our Universe. In this work, I present the questions of how might our use or mis-use of technology permanently alter the future of humanity and what is our personal responsibility for our effect on the world and each other? It is my attempt to capture the complexity and beauty of the underlying mechanisms that bind us in an emotion.

—Daniel Martin Diaz

Two years ago, we published a trio of prints with Daniel Martin Diaz; the images were taken from Daniel’s “Soul of Science” book, and were inspired by scientific drawings. We loved this series, and apparently you did too: all three prints sold out in short order.

How to follow it up? After talking things over with Daniel, we decided to go big, and are proud to present “Eternal Universe”.

Measuring 29″ × 37 ½″, it’s bigger than the original trio of prints combined.

Keen-eyed viewers may notice something a little uncharacteristic about this print: we left some of the ink from the intaglio process on the edges and corners of the plate instead of wiping it entirely clean. Usually we’re sticklers for clean printing, but after a few tests, the extra layer of un-wiped ink added a delightful depth to the print’s antiqued patina.

Speaking of which — we’d never antiqued anything this large! Staining this edition required developing some new stain formulas, bigger baths and brushes, and significant adjustments to the various wetting and drying times that each print goes through, but the end result was worth it: a subtle, organic, and layered ground for Daniel’s intricate, symbolic imagery.

The last, final touch on these prints: a sculpted emboss featuring the five platonic solids. The perfect accent for an edition that combines the geometric with the alchemic and the rational with the mysterious.

“Eternal Universe” is available now on pressureprinting.com.

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A Print of Bowie for Rory

Rory Kurtz completed the above illustration for Rolling Stone magazine, which published it alongside a recent feature on David Bowie’s new album, Blackstar.

After Bowie’s death, Rory decided to turn the illustration into a limited edition print, and asked us to handle the print’s production. We love Rory’s work and wouldn’t be where we are or who we are without David Bowie, so we were grateful for the opportunity to contribute.

About its production, Rory said,

Graphite and digital. And endless hours with tiny brushstrokes listening to “Life on Mars”.

“The Quiet” is available now, for one day only. The sale ends at 10pm CST on Friday, January 22nd. Please head to rorykurtz.com for more details and for the opportunity to purchase this beautiful piece.

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Travis Louie’s “Mr. Stephenson and the Bug”

The two previous editions we’ve published with Travis Louie have been a couple of personal favorites. His work – with its antique, airbrushy, photo-surreal vibes – translates fabulously into intaglio prints, and takes to the embossing, embellishing, and hand-staining we so love to do like a fish to water.

So it is with great pleasure that we’re unveiling our largest print with Travis to date: Mr. Stephenson and the Bug

Our previous prints with Travis have been fairly small in comparison to the original paintings. But the scales involved in this image required something bigger. The presumptive Mr. Stephenson’s face must be legible. And the bug needed to be big.

So instead of feeling like an 8″ × 10″ – approachable, hand-held – this print is 19″ × 21″: poster-sized, impressive, at home on walls.

We’ve been on a bit of an intaglio printing tear recently; printing something a little larger (with such deep, velvety blacks!) proved fun.

Staining something this large proved challenging! Note the number of ointments, dyes, pigments, sponges and brushes in the picture below. Years of experience have added numerous little complications and refinements to our staining process. And after all these years, it still takes my breath away when the first one comes out of the bath. The process breathes such warmth, depth, and life into the prints.

Flatten, dry, chop. We also took the liberty of letterpressing a title into the margin, but were smart enough keep it simple and let Travis’ calligraphic signature steal the show.

Mr. Stephenson and the Bug is available now on pressureprinting.com.

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Annie Owens’ “Yee Naaldlooshi (Skinwalker)”

We ❤ Hi-Fructose. We liked issue #1 so much that we took out an ad out in issue #2. Ten years and thirty-six issues later, we’re proud to call editors Annie Owens and Attaboy collaborators and friends. We couldn't hold them in higher esteem.

In addition to bringing fantastic art to thousands of people a few times each year via the magazine, Atta and Annie are also amazing artists themselves. When we saw Annie’s skinwalker watercolor on Instagram almost a year ago, we were entranced. And we weren’t alone – when we re-grammed it it garnered more likes than anything we’d posted before, and still has more likes than anything we’ve posted since. Small wonder: the Navajo witch who can transform into any animal she chooses is a being both evil and mysterious, and Annie’s painting embodies that magic.

The watercolor was a part of Antler Gallery’s Unnatural Histories III show; we bought it immediately and begged Annie to let us print an edition. Happily, she assented.

We figured the biggest challenge in printing the image would be nailing the two-color separation. It took a few complex Photoshop operations and test plates to get the pink plate and the black plate just right, but the result is simply gorgeous. Softer than the original, with flatter tones and feathered edges, the print has a smoky beauty all its own.

A joy to print and a joy to behold, Yee Naaldlooshi (Skinwalker) is available now on pressureprinting.com.

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COOP’s “Devil Girl Odalisque”

First came the devil in a ’49 Mercury. Then, a skull; most recently: a motor. What could possibly come next, in our series of very-large-scale relief prints with the inimitable COOP? Could it have been anything other than a Devil Girl Odalisque?

Nope! We’ve had the next print in this series on our minds ever since we published the last one; COOP sent us a few images one lucky day and this one stuck out as the obvious choice.

With the image chosen, it was time to print. In the making of posts of the previous giant COOP prints, we’ve stressed just how difficult large-scale relief printing is. Pressing giant sheets of paper into the gaping crevices of our magnesium plates has caused all sorts of trouble, as the paper warps, creases, and skips over the topology of the plate, causing all sorts of unsightly defects. We’ve tackled these problems in the past with intricate paper-board make-ready which guided the paper softly up and down the plate’s cliffs and valleys. This time around, we found a *far* simpler solution which gives equally impressive results. I’ve been sworn to a bit of secrecy, but I can tell you this: we’re not babying the paper anymore. If anything, it’s under more (and more intelligently distributed!) pressure than ever before.

The results speak for themselves:

Signing trips for COOP prints are always fun, as we get to gawk at his beautiful Los Angeles studio.

This one was especially notable, as we got to meet his beautiful baby boy, too.

Devil Girl Odalisque is available now on pressureprinting.com.

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Renée French’s Sea Monsters

The roots of the trio of Sea Monsters prints we’re releasing today go way back — all the way back. Thirteen years ago when we were talking to Dave Cooper about the project that would become Unnature and the company that would become Pressure Printing, Dave kept bringing up one artist in particular as somebody to watch: Renée French.

She’s been on our radar ever since. We’ve followed her award-winning comics career (and, more recently, her awesome Instagram!) from afar but it took seeing her work up close to finally approach her about collaborating. The three images above began life as a trio of graphite drawings on velum, shown at the Dubious Expedition show at Leanna Lin’s Wonderland last November. After seeing these exquisite, fuzzy, foggy, and frankly, very funny pencil renderings up close, we couldn’t resist buying two of them and approaching Renée about printing editions of all three. She obliged!

Here’s the point in the post where I normally talk about how the project presented us with unique, unforeseen technical challenges that we overcame through experimentation and perseverance. I’m happy — overjoyed! — to tell you that these editions printed like a dream. Except for an ill-advised, quickly-abandoned attempt to emboss the creatures’ eyes (trust us, this sounds cooler than it looked), the printing proceeded as smoothly and beautifully as we always hope it will.

Etch, ink, wipe, print, dry, sign, pack and now — sell. Renée’s trio of separately-sold Sea Monsters prints (The Clenching of Sirenia, The Scary Porpoise, and The Freckled Menzies) are available now on pressureprinting.com.

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Marion Peck’s “Two Witches Meeting on a Road”

As managers of Porterhouse Fine Art Editions, we’re blessed to know Marion not only as fans, but also as colleagues and best of all, friends. Whilst wearing our Porterhouse hats, we’ve produced and sold Marion’s books, postcard sets, posters and giclées. But never a fine art print – until now. The right images didn’t come along until last year, when Marion painted a quartet of witchy images in ochre and white.

It was Marion who suggested that we turn Two Witches Meeting on a Road into a fine art print. With its not-quite-monochromatic palette and soft, subtle gradations, we knew it was perfect for intaglio.

Mixing and matching plates to mimic the two tones of the original turned out to be a bit trickier than we’d bargained for. After numerous, increasingly complicated attempts at separating the original image into two plates, we settled on a simple solution: use the same plate, twice, but ink it differently!

Hand-inking and hand-wiping an intaglio plate is a meticulous process — more art than science. Usually we try very hard to ink and wipe plates evenly in order to reproduce the original image as faithfully as possible. But for this edition, we took advantage of the flexibility that hand-wiping provides in order to achieve the two-toned effect that we desired. A little more bright red-orange here, a bit lighter on the blackened sepia there, and the finished print took on the subtle tonal charms of the original.

We embossed the prints with a Pressure Printing chop on one side and a Porterhouse bee on the other, then added a crisply letterpressed title and hand-stained the paper in order to give it depth, warmth, and texture.

Finally, we flew the edition to California and back for signing and numbering. And voilà — our first fine art edition with Marion. Hopefully it won’t be the last!

Two Witches Meeting on a Road is available exclusively from porterhouseart.com.

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Aron Wiesenfeld’s “Vigil”

vigil

|ˈvijəl|

noun

A period of keeping awake during the time usually spent asleep, especially to keep watch or pray.

These images are quiet and still. Something has happened, or will. Not recently; not soon.

We’ve wanted to do a print with Aron for ages, and have been tossing project proposals back and forth with him for years. All of those discussions finally settled upon a pair of images that Aron sent us one happy day — two out of a series of eight “Vigil” drawings that he has completed over the last few years. They were perfect. We were off!

We asked Aron to share something of his process, and he sent along an initial sketch and two pieces of inspiration so fitting that they made me go “of course!”: an Atget and a Caravaggio.

Aron’s original drawings were completed on rough, toothy paper. At first, we were convinced that we should print the images on something similarly toothy. The intaglio process involves a tremendous amount of pressure, and the idea of a smooth, debossed image sunk into a thick, rough sheet which echoed the grit of the originals entranced us all.

But after a long bout of experimentation (and three rounds of proofs sent back and forth to Aron) we ended up printing the edition on Revere Silk — the smoothest paper we tried. The shades in Aron’s drawing are extremely subtle, and no matter what we tried we couldn’t get the intricate, scratchy textures imparted by the original drawing’s surface to reproduce on a similarly rough printing paper. On rougher paper, a thousand subtle, scratchy grays collapsed into a uniform tone, but Revere Silk paper was able to capture every detail. Revere Silk won the day.

Once we had a stack of fifty-five perfect prints, we sent them off to Aron for signing and numbering:

And cancelled the plates so that the edition can never be reprinted:

With that, the project was finished. These prints were a long time coming; collaborating with Aron has been something we’ve worked towards for years and we’re overjoyed to be able to offer up the fruits of those long labors. Vigil goes on sale this Thursday, February 12th at 9:00 AM MST on pressureprinting.com.

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ONEQ’s “UneUne”

We released a new print today, with a new collaborator — UneUne, by ONEQ.

The title is pronounced oo-neh-oo-neh, and ONEQ had this to say about it:

“UneUne is a Japanese word. It’s an onomatopoeia.

These are all of UneUne’s meanings: winding, undulating, meandering, tortuous, zigzag. UneUne is so pleasant to my ear, so I gave the name ‘UneUne’ to this print.

Also, because ‘UneUne’ was drawn by a tortuous line.

It’s a very Japanese-taste line.”

ONEQ’s haunting, noirish monochrome portraits are a perfect fit for intaglio prints. They mix soft, subtle lights and flat, dense blacks in ways that couldn’t be more suited to the medium.

ONEQ’s tack-sharp rendering freed us up to go big, giving this cinematic image the larger-than-life scale it deserves.

Large prints are challenging and we experimented freely with huge delicate sheets of (exquisite, expensive) Tosa Hanga rice paper. After a few test runs, we proceeded with appropriate care…

…and ended up with a stack of forty perfect prints. Which took a trip across the Pacific and back for signing…

…before we were finally able to unveil them to the world for sale, today, on pressureprinting.com.

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Robert MacKenzie’s “Exhumation 1 & 2”

We released a new pair of prints in conjunction with Robert MacKenzie today — Exhumation 1 and Exhumation 2. They’re absolute beauts.

These drawings first appeared in the awesome Tiny Pencil 4 anthology and we couldn’t be happier to produce a hand-printed, limited edition of intaglio prints from them. Each pair has been impressed on to Rives BFK paper, embossed with a printer’s chop, and comes signed and numbered by Robert.

They’re available through both pressureprinting.com and Robert’s store, for $200.

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Robert MacKenzie’s “Goodly Creatures”

From time to time we get requests to do contract printing for artists; on rare occasions we accept. Robert MacKenzie approached us with a drawing that we couldn’t refuse:

This drawing contains multitudes: a myriad of personalities, vignettes, and tiny details to discover.

Robert had this to say about it:

The characters and spaces in my art are a product of the patterns and stimuli I encounter every day in the architecture, food, and people of my two cities, New York and San Francisco. I am always trying to take these disparate elements that relate to my experiences and repurpose them to create inhuman characters that are culturally and emotionally ambiguous, yet still struggle with very human issues like isolation, interaction and cooperation with one another.

The print process, as it so often does, turned out to be a bit more complicated than we’d anticipated. The way the drawing was separated into two colors left zero room for error in the alignment of the plates, which required a little trickery and a lot of care to nail down. Robert ended up patching a few of the gaps by hand and, while he was at it, added some subtle colored pencil embellishments.

Having spent so much time with the image, when we saw it printed in its final (unusual) pair of colors (it’s a subtle thing, but the orange + blue = faintly oscillating grays plate-tone is beautiful), in the end we decided to ditch the “contract work” label and make this a full-blown Pressure Printing edition. We’re proud to add Robert to our roster of exceptional artists; the print (which is frankly a steal at $350) is available from both Robert’s (brand new!) online store and from us at Pressure Printing.

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Gold Bug Identity Design

We recently had the chance to do some identity design for our friends at Gold Bug, whose LA store is a wonder and an inspiration. A self-described "21st century cabinet of curiosities" — mixing contemporary art, biological specimens, and a singular eye for the unusual — Gold Bug is a joy to visit and they were an absolute joy to work for.

You really can't go wrong with shiny gold, matte black, and an embossed beetle, but this curvy box came out quite nicely.

And how about this ovular business card?

A rewarding project for an amazing client. Gold Bug!

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25%-Off Holiday Sale

(Turkey photo via the Denver Public Library)

Happy holidays! Happy Friday! We don’t hold sales very often; we haven’t held a proper one in over a year. ’Tis the season! We’re discounting everything in the store 25% from now thru the end of the day on Monday, December 1st when you use the code “HOLIDAY” at checkout. Take a gander at what’s available and gobble up hand-crafted editions from our decade+ back catalog at a rare, deep discount.

Lucky ’13 has been a great year for Pressure Printing — full of amazing collaborations with some of our favorite artists — friends and associates both old and new. Sincere thanks to all of them for their trust, hard work, and for being daily sources of inspiration... and sincere thanks to all of you who have supported us with your time, money and attention this and every year.

We feel like we’ve built something pretty special here at Pressure Printing, where we can be a bridge, bringing great art by great artists to great people. Thanks.

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Femke Hiemstra’s “I Think of Thee When Far Away”

We love Femke! One of our favorite things about her paintings (a couple of which we’re lucky enough to have around the office) are her amazing color palettes, which somehow manage to feel modern, old-master-y, cozy, and creepy, all at the same time. These colors were absent in the edition of intaglio prints we completed from Femke’s intricate graphite drawing in 2009.

And we were just as sad as everyone else that Femke’s only book has been out of print for ages.

How to fill these gaps? By publishing a set of 16 eminently affordable, full-color postcards, of course.

They’re cheap; they’re gorgeous.

We approached Femke with the idea earlier this year; she hand-picked a selection of images from across her career and gave the set its evocative name. A cover design and a few press checks later, and we’re proud to announce that we have fresh stacks of postcards to share with the world.

It has been a while since we’ve published an edition like this under the Pressure Printing moniker. But witnessing the perennial popularity of the micro-portfolios we produce whilst wearing our other hat as Porterhouse Fine Art Editions, and watching James Jean’s Parallel Lives catalog fly off our shelves last year has us thinking about publishing more affordable editions going forward. Our roots are in commercial print design and we’ve never stopped designing books. So while traditional fine art printmaking will always be the core of what Pressure Printing does… watch this space. And pick up some postcards!

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Audrey Kawasaki’s “Eien”

Our first collaboration with Audrey, Okimiyage, was released five years ago in June. It sold out immediately and has gone on to become our most-requested print of all time.

The project was such a huge success (artistically, financially, and critically) that we immediately began work on a second series of frames — in dark walnut this time, rather than light maple — that would one day house a companion print. That day has finally come.

We sent Audrey the first walnut prototype back in ’08; I like to imagine that, inspired by its deep, rich color, she spent the intervening years figuring out how to work her effervescent lines into appropriately black & bold compositions. Whatever the inspiration, that’s certainly the direction that her work has taken as of late. The drawing, when it arrived, was a perfect fit.

She called it Eien, which looks like this: えいえん (and this: 永遠) in Japanese and translates to “forever,” “eternity,” or “permanence.”

It was time to fire up the presses.

Download video: MPEG-4, Ogg Vorbis

And the foil stampers!

Download video: MPEG-4, Ogg Vorbis

I should probably mention, too, that we built these frames from raw lumber, completely by hand. They’ve been a fixture in the studio for so long that I almost take them for granted; the hours that went into their hand-rubbed finishes, delicate joinery, paper-thin tolerances, and innumerable coats of finely sanded-down finish are now but a distant memory.

Before we could frame anything we needed to send the freshly printed edition off to Audrey for signing, numbering, and some exquisite hand-tinting in pink:

All that was left was to put the pieces together:

Worth the wait.

Due to high demand, we’re taking the unusual step of pre-announcing this sale. Eien will be available for purchase at noon PDT on Tuesday, July 23rd, on pressureprinting.com.