Fellow letterpress lovers – please enjoy these images at your next Zoom meeting . Download the file and upload to your ZOOM settings in your account. [Hint: Right-click on a photo and save the file to your local desktop.]
We’ll be revealing one each day so come back + check in often!
Need help applying these cool ZOOM backgrounds to your next meeting?Easy-to-follow instructions are at this link. The artwork is intentionally flipped. This will show right-reading text when you are using your camera in your ZOOM meeting.
This will be perfect at these upcoming events: -Ladies of Letterpress Virtual Conference – September 25-27, 2020 -Awayzgoose at Hamilton Wood Type – November 5-8, 2020
Monday, September 14th, 2020 Free Download: Heidelberg Windmill
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020Free Download: Manicules
Wednesday, September 16th, 2020 Free Download:Vandercook
Thursday, September 17th, 2020 Free Download:Wooden Ornaments
Friday, September 18th, 2020 Free Download:Vandercook Bed Height Gauge
It’s hard to put into words how much our world has changed (both locally and globally) in just a short period of time. We struggle to keep up with daily reports and advisements. However, out of this comes sharing and goodness from those around us and our own printing community.
Here at Boxcar Press, we’d like to share with you a little bit of that goodness offered online (from a safe social distance in these times). It’s inspiring to know that there are good folks out there spreading some cheer!
If you’d like to shine the spotlight on someone, let us know! We’d love to hear from you!
Live Daily Readings of Children’s Books With Mary Bruno(of Bruno Press) via Instagram. Come share a good time from Minnesota with Mary every day starting at 12 Noon Central Time!
(image courtesy of Mary Bruno of Bruno Press)
Wilderness of Social Distancing letterpress card from Waterknot Press (from Portland, Oregon).
(image courtesy of Waterknot Press)
Waterknot will be offering a buy 4 get one free special on their website — indefinitely. No code required. Just put 5 cards in your cart and you will only be charged for 4 of them. (via their IG account)
Free Downloadable Color Book PDF – cool creatures and fantastic beasts from Isaac Bidwell of Pickled Punks. Grab a set of crayons and have some fun from this fellow Syracuse-based artist!
(image courtesy of Isaac Bidwell of Pickled Punks)
(Fun fact: Isaac Bidwell is an artist that works in the same building as us — the Delavan Center in Syracuse, NY!).
Spring Ephemerals of New York State “Color Your Own Letterpress Print” from Lion Tail Press of Ithaca, New York.
Laurin Ramsey (via IG): “Hey friends! In these uncertain times, when so many of us are isolated indoors, it’s more important than ever to bring beauty and sunshine in however we can. Spring is coming, so I’ve created my first “color your own” letterpress print for us adults and kids, too! Printed on 100% cotton, acid-free paper, this takes beautifully to watercolors, colored pencils, markers, or whatever coloring tool strikes your fancy. Keep for yourself to brighten your home, or send to a loved one who could use some comfort.
(image courtesy of Laurin Ramsey of Lion Tail Press)
Starting today, I’m also offering a 15% site-wide discount at liontailpress.com, when you enter code SHOPSMALL at checkout. This COVID discount also applies to LP e-gift cards AND custom design work going forward! Thank you so much for your continued love and support through this time, for reaching out to loved ones and neighbors, taking good care of yourselves, and taking all of it one day at a time. We’re in this together!”
Watch“Making Faces: Metal Type in the21st Century” for free via Vimeo. Grab a bowl of popcorn, your favorite snack & enjoy the beautifully documented film on making metal type by P22 Type Foundry and Rich Kegler (Rochester, New York).
Daily Art Challenge. Stretch those creative muscles daily with Raven’s Wish Gallery art challenge! Raven’s Wish (in Janesville, Wisconsin) posts daily on their Facebook the next thing to make, post, photograph, or do! There is sure to be a challenge theme that will rev your artistic juices.
Try A New Printing Technique (or Revisit a Favorite One!) Have fun pulling out some of your printing and printmaking books to brainstorm a new print project. Need ideas? The Printmaking Ideas Book by Frances Stanfield and Lucy McGeown is chock full of great projects!
Printing With Kitchen Items Can’t get to your press? Never fear – embrace your wooden or kitchen spoon to make a print! You’ll use the metal or wooden spoon as a baren to make fun, fantastic prints!
These suggestions are a drop in the bucket of all the ideas out there for creativity, entertainment, and boredom-fighting while you isolate and distance. Share yours with us! We’re curious to see what you’ve got going on!
We are thrilled to share with you photographs of a beautiful collaboration between the Washington Poetic Routes project and a small group of Washington-based artisanal printers. The project itself is a digital poetry-mapping program that explores Washington state’s bountiful geographical terrain and that of the human relationships within.
The enterprise has joined together Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts, countless wonderful poets across the state, and eight letterpress artists to create the beautiful letterpress broadsides. At Boxcar Press, we are privileged to showcase and highlight this magnum opus of creativity. Below are photos of the process, as well as few shots of the incredibly crafted pieces. Enjoy!
Claudia Castro Luna, the creator of the Washington Poetic Routes website and SVC’s Designer in Residence from 2018–2019, has this to say:
I think of the poems on this map as heartbeats. Red beats full of candor and intimacy the way only a poem can transmit. My hope is that when reading them one after the other the dots shape in the reader’s mind a new set of travel routes, a complement and an alternative to the to the road routes drawn in on the map. The green routes take us physically from Point A to Point B. Depending on how the reader clicks on them, the dots will create a new constellation of routes: emotional, spiritual routes that tap into memory, into history, into joy, into our desires and frustrations, into land, trees, fish and bird song.
My hope is that together, through our own poems of place we will have a new, different way of engaging with each other as citizens. Together we create a living map of what is like to live in this wonderful place we share called Washington State.
The portfolio includes a diverse representation of poems from across the state. I chose “The Rhody Garden” because not only is the rhododendron our state flower and I happen to have a whole forest of them in my backyard, but I loved the poet’s whimsical description of their bloom cycle.
This broadside was printed in 3 passes. The text and line art were printed in black with a Boxcar photopolymer plate. Then, I overprinted the black pass with a linocut, first in bright pink, then cutting away from the same linoleum block and printing it again in darker magenta—a very straightforward reduction cut!
Though I am usually so careful, somehow I managed to impale the palm of my hand with my carving tool while working on this. A quick trip to urgent care and some super glue fixed me right up, and now I have a scar to scare my students with.
This project involved teamwork at several levels. Arts agencies, our state’s poet laureate, Seattle’s fantastic School of Visual Concepts, and eight letterpress artists. I was one of them. And, oh—my wife and printing partner. She dove in as facilitator of the whole shebang (lots of emails, a little guidance). Everyone’s team spirit resulted in eight poetry broadsides, all collected into a stunning folio constructed by Windowpane Press.
My wife and I operate The North Press in Port Townsend, Washington. Poetry broadsides are about ninety percent of what we print. I selected Sandra Meade’s “Blackbird Sings at Night”; for its shape: tall and narrow—and because it’s a terrific Poem.
Our experience is that it’s best to start the design process with the body of the poem, to look at how it will occupy the page—what type, what size, what placement—and then the poem title and the author’s name, followed by subtitle, attributions, etc. I try to keep in mind that I’m working with someone else’s creative work, so there’s no messing with the poem’s alignment or indents. My job is to elevate the poem and not overshadow it with graphic whizbangs. That said, I’m comfortable with some sort of illustration secondary to the poem, and Ms. Meade gave me plenty to work with.
We teach a workshop called “Pixels to Print”. It’s about converting digital photographs to high-contrast art (what we used to call “camera ready”). The grass beneath the rural mailbox is an example of making a polymer plate from a continuous tone, full color photograph. With the right sequence of steps, many images—even blurry snapshots like the one we took on a road trip in South Dakota—can be converted to high-contrast and printed from polymer. For this composite illustration, I began with the grass. Then the mailbox. Then the cancellation and, finally, the bird. We had Pablo Neruda’s signature from a previous Project.
I ran black, gray, and red inks on the press. In that order. The red was the smallest plate I’ve ever printed, but there was no question that the blackbird’s wing would get its own impression. I love the poem’s reference to the mailman’s/blackbird’s “official shoulder patches”.
As I said, my broadside was only part of this project. Credit should go to Ellie Mathews for facilitating and to the other printers involved: Amy Redmond, Annabelle Larner, Heidi Hespelt, Chris Copley, Marie Kuch-Stanofsky, Jenny Wilkson, and Sukhie Patel. Midway through the process, we managed to gather for a critique session in which everyone shared their design considerations. Working in concert with these artists was both inspiring and humbling. I think I can speak for the group of us to say that we are grateful to Boxcar Press for sponsoring the project, and to Neenah Paper for contributing enough Neenah Cotton in Pearl White for the eight, 8×10 inch broadsides plus the cover sheet explaining the project. Teamwork!
I was honored to be part of the Washington Poetic Routes: Poems of Place project. I was immediately drawn to Luther Allen’s poem, dropping down the west side of the cascades. I love the way he transitions from the mountains of Steven’s Pass (about 80 miles east of Seattle) to the ocean, and how he depicts change in the environment. And he really captured the mossy green wetness of our area. Here’s the poem:
By Luther Allen, at Steven’s Pass this is it. the smell of green of damp rot, of slugs and ferns and staggering grand trees the smell of festering tidal flats the burst of orcas through a rain-matted sea. the smell of gulls and sea lions salmon and cedar longhouses of pulp mills and seattle traffic shrouded in mysterious islands and miles and miles and miles of raw ocean.
I always want to try new things when a project presents itself to me (sometimes frustrating myself for experimenting under a deadline!), so I thought of printing on wood because it felt right for the poem. I found a beautiful piece with whorls and knots, which looked both watery and woodsy.
For the background I mixed a mossy greenish color that had enough transparent in it to also feel layered like water. For the first pass on the wood I used a pressure print to create a mountain silhouette. This was a challenge, and took a lot of tests in order to not lose the whorls and details of the wood while pressure printing, so I ended double-inking each one.
The poem was hand-set set in the slab-serif, Stymie, which I felt befitted his words and I liked the way the type looked with the wood. I played with various layouts for the poem and was happy to stagger the title a bit, to reflect the dropping down words.
We delighted in the delicate linework in the field guide prints that came across our desks. Illustration artist Clara Cline & letterpress printer Colby Beck of Post Rider Press bring these gorgeous (and highly informative) American field guides to life via letterpress.
ILLUSTRATING FOR LETTERPRESS
CLARA CLINE: I’ve always loved nature, but when I first created the guide for my home state of Virginia I didn’t intend for it to become a series. The print seemed to resonate with folks and I started getting requests for more states, and as I did more I became absorbed in learning about each state’s local ecosystems. It wasn’t until I listened to a podcast about John Audubon’s quest to draw every bird in North America that I decided I wanted to commit to a larger project exploring native species and biogeography.
I’m a big proponent of tailoring your work to the production medium, but I feel like letterpress has influenced my illustration style even more than I expected. As I see the detail Colby’s capable of putting into each print, I find myself pushing more fine lines in my own work. I really value having a print partner who can provide feedback and guidance to ensure that what I deliver is going to translate the best way possible.
THE FINE DETAILS WHILE ON PRESS
COLBY BECK: My press is a 10×15 Chandler & Price made in 1952 and equipped with a variable speed motor. I named it Carl after it’s previous owner who printed commercially in Northern Virginia and even printed some work for the US government. Carl, the man, passed away and his press was left in the back of a friend’s machine repair shop. We dug it out and moved it down to Richmond, Virginia where I began Post Rider Press.
The Field Guide prints are 11×17 and since I run a 10 x 15 platen press, I have to print them in two sections. The illustrations get printed first because they take more finessing and then the type is printed second. When printing one design in two sections, the key is to keep the ink coverage as consistent as possible. You really have to keep a close eye on them to make sure the type is matching the illustrations so that it appears it was printed all at once.
It really depends on the amount we are printing but the print runs can take at least a full day in the studio. Due to their size, the Field Guides require a good amount of ink, which means stopping to re-ink between every 15-20 prints.
FAVORITE PART OF THE PROJECT
CLARA: That’s such a tough question! There’s so many different phases of this project that I appreciate in their own way. I do quite a bit of research to get a balanced group of species for each state, and it’s been really rewarding learning more about biogeography and our environmental balances.
That being said, as an illustrator it’s such a treat to see your work in letterpress. It’s wildly different going from a flat ink drawing to the richness of texture that letterpress allows, so every time a new guide arrives I feel like a kid at Christmas.
COLBY: I so admire Clara as an illustrator and to watch the detailed lines of her pen work come to life through letterpress printing is magical. I get so excited every time we print another state. It never gets old to watch the ridges of a shell or hair of an animal create a beautiful texture in the paper.
We’re still very much the same questioning, searching, and inquisitive bunch of folks and this month’s installment is a good testament to this. We enjoy the wonderful, creative, and just plain cool things that catch our eye day in and day out. In this latest installment that made us oooh and ahhhh, we bring you a cool kickstarter giving new life to an Okuma litho proof press, a hue-tastic interactive color exhibit, beautiful traditional bookbinding and much more!
From Maddie:
Lithosphere: The Story of Big Dreams and A Big Press
Shelley Thornstensen of the Printmakers Open Forum has successfully completed a kickstarter that involves moving & setting up a big, beautiful Okuma flatbed lithography offset proof press. Thornstensen envisions a new life for large scale equipment for her print shop in Oxford, Pennsylvania. This press, 13.5 feet long and over 10,000 pounds is a versatile piece of equipment that will print woodblocks, litho plates, or litho stones. She has unique techniques to use on this press and looks forward to sharing this knowledge with other printmakers (please check out her summer print camp!).
In completing her financing campaign to move and perform maintenance on the press, she has found a wonderful amount of support and a lot of encouragement from the printmaking, as well as an online community. Thornstensen returns the favor with many rewards for participating in the fundraiser. These include stickers, totes, fine arts prints, and t-shirts with a bear design designed by Andrew Mullaly (fun fact: Okuma means “bear” in Japanese!).
Check out her social media page ( Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler ) to see the latest developments on this cool project and see the new press for yourself. Leave her a comment just to say “hey” and to remind her how awesome she is!
The enchanting all-ages interactive exhibit features brilliantly colored rooms to dazzle the senses — from a light blue ball pit room, a history & origin of colors room (so cool!), custom-colored macarons in their gift shop, and more.
Originally based & started in 2017 in San Francisco, the exhibit’s popularity soon blossomed into the NYC and a Houston installment exhibit. Currently, the pop-up experience exhibit is going from now until April 2020.
Grab tickets NYC here (https://colorfactory.co/tickets)! The Color factory is located at 251 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013.
New Archeology Find in Upstate New York: The World’s Oldest Forest
A tree root system that is 385 million years old was discovered in the Catskills region in the fossil soils near Cairo, New York (about a 3-hour-ish car drive from us here at Boxcar Press). The findings show potential forests and flora evolved during the Devonian age (the age of fish as well as early forms of sharks, spiders, and insects).
For reference, the Tyrannosaurus rex was living between 68-66 million years ago. Woah!
I enjoy all videos that show letterpress printing, printmaking and book arts. This one appeals to me because it’s serene and zen-like. It is pleasing to the eye with the colorful paper and the tools and watching her work. Her voice and hands just soothe. I hope it pleases you.
We hope you explore some of our links and perhaps learn a little bit more about what interests us here at Boxcar Press. Email us at info@boxcarpress.com the things that delight you also!
Come check out our list of the top 14 favorite gifts for this upcoming Valentine’s Day 2020 —from funny to fantastic gifts, letterpress cards, and more to let your printing sweetie know who’s tops.
Spot the gift you are going to nab for your Valentine this year? Let us know in the comments below!
A new year and a fresh new decade signals one thing: a new wave of brilliant letterpress! We polled our printers here at Boxcar Press to give us their quick, top printing tips to help jumpstart 2020. Perhaps a few of these nuggets of wisdom will make their way into your next printing adventure!
Want to share your top tip? Let us know in the comments section below!
If you have a thin rule line or the end of a line of type that is getting too blobby, try using an “end cap” of a scrap photopolymer plate (like a small rectangle of it) and put it beyond the trim area. This is so that the rollers use it like an inking roller bearer strip. It helps keep the pressure off that one trouble spot.
When beginning a job, do a dry paper test run. There shouldn’t be any impression or ink. This run is so you can adjust the tilt sucker bar to where you want it, make sure it isn’t double-feeding, adjust the tempo of the paper pick-up and more. Getting this out of the way is one less thing you don’t have to fuss with while in the middle of a job.
For foil on a Kluge, make sure you are using the correct suckers and are maintaining them. Metal suckers work for text weight and envelope liners. Rubber suckers are good for text weight, coaster stock, thinner leather, or textiles. To keep them in shape, I’ll use a bent paper clip or something small to clean out any fibers or lint that may get up there.
Printing envelopes on the Windmill with a lay pin is a bit labor-intensive but it can work. You’ll need to cut out a shape in the tympan where the lay pin will “nestle” into. This is so that the pin has a place to rest into and not mark the envelope when the press closes. Or alternatively, use our Boxcar Press swing away lay gauge so you don’t have to worry about marks.
When working to print lighter pastel ink colors on the Heidelberg Windmill try the following:
First, use an aggressive cleaner (Putz Pomade comes to mind) to help clean out any remaining ink from a previous run.
Make sure the ink is mixed up correctly and proportionately. Having a ready-to-go pre-mixed stock of ink is very handy (like Cool Grey 1 or other ink colors that contain a lot of Transparent White).
Use a very small bit of ink (small dabs or dots) and slowly add it to the roller. This first ink test run will mostly be checking consistency and to see if there is any ink leftover from a previous run. Run make-ready scrap through the press to see where you stand.
If you are running large solids for foil on a Kluge and are only getting the center to print, adjust the base itself using the screws. Most of the time, the base isn’t hitting flush and making these adjustments will help. Use glass board with soft packing on top. Try using a glue stick to glue the soft packing together as well. The compressed paper and glue makes for an even surface.
When doing foil on the Windmill, getting the right temperature for release can be tricky. Start by keeping good notes at regular intervals on foil release temperatures & times to keep things organized. A journal, jotter, or dedicated scrap of paper will do. When on the press for a job, regularly write down the temperatures so you can go back to it if you need to re-run the job. This helps a lot.
Wear comfortable shoes and don’t be distracted by smartphones as you’ll need to be listening to the sounds your press is making. For example, there is a subtle difference in the whooshing sound when the suckers are picking up the paper correctly…. and when it’s not.
If you are printing black letterpress on a Heidelberg and want a richer, deeper coverage, try a double-hit of the black ink runs (two regular ink run passes — one on top of the other). This helps reduce over-inking. Take care that you are in perfect registration.
Use transparent tape on the Windmill rails to help even out high and low spots. A piece here or there can make all the difference in the laying down of ink along the rails.
Like most letterpress-loving people, we are drawn to the fascinating and the intriguing. This newest installment of the Inquisitive Printers focuses our attentions on cool history of playing cards (and Nintendo!) plus a portable printing museum, a Miami-based high school teacher and printer, and much more. Enjoy!
Nintendo’s release of the latest Pokemon video game is not where I thought I’d find my printerly inquisition focused this month, admittedly; bear with me and I’ll lay out why it’s tickling my fancy so.
Pokemon began as a GameBoy title, but at the turn of the millennium it reached an outstanding level of cultural clout in its incarnation as a strategy and trading card game. Many of my generation heeded that none-too-subtle imperative “gotta catch ‘em all” filled school recesses and study hall periods with sharp-eyed trades and tournament play.
While it was never quite my scene, I did admire the quality finishing that went into the cards, with the full-color printing and foil embellishment on the various rare specimens. A much greater fascination to me is the fact that the entire Nintendo games empire had its beginning as a manufacturer of playing cards all the way back to 1889!
This culture-defining behemoth of our video game era plugs directly backward into the larger and wilder story of playing cards, which themselves are deliciously wrapped up in the origins of the printing arts themselves.
Squint at them and you can see how dice, dominoes, and chess games are the simpler, sturdier parents of playing cards. For there to be cards, there has to be paper and printing, and so, of course, the first playing cards emerge in China. Unfortunately, since paper is so fragile and cards are objects much-handled, the earliest examples don’t survive into history. An early reference to their existence comes in 1294 A.D., documenting the arrest of two gamblers and the confiscation of both their game cards and the woodblocks that printed them. These cards weren’t merely for making wagers with, but themselves actually served as tokens exchangeable for money or drinks at the tavern: valuable collectible items, indeed!
Papermaking, printing, and playing cards traveled as a pack from China to Samarkand (Uzbekistan), then on to Baghdad to spread across the Mediterranean through the Muslim caliphates and the remnants of the Byzantine empire. Taking shape in Egypt and exported quickly across trade routes into Moorish Spain, the Arabic “mamluk” card game had already assumed a form familiar to the modern playing deck: 52 cards, arranged in four suits, ordered by ranks culminating in royal court figures. “Mamluk” means “property”, referring to a class of enslaved mercenary soldiers within the prevailing caste system. Puts one in mind of the more disturbing aspects of the Pokemon life cycle, with trainers “catching ‘em all” then making them fight each other for the trainers’ glory. (Just sayin’.)
By the 14th century, these playing cards were spread across Europe and quickly became nativized. Mamluks easily translated into the aristocratic ranks of Europe’s feudal system, and those original four suits — polo sticks, swords, cups, and coins — mutated based on local culture. Spanish, German, Swiss, and Italian styled suits survive into the 20th century right alongside the French style we in the Anglo-American world are most familiar with: clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds. (Tarot enthusiasts will note that those original mamluk suits are exactly those that became our beloved and much-mystified oracle deck, but that also-very-printerly story needs another time for telling.)
As the printers of Marseilles, Nürnburg, and Venice stamped out the cards in varying grades of quality, so too did the traders vend these printed goods to the world. Portuguese traders arrived in Japan in 1543, carrying Iberian playing cards in their holds. The Portuguese word “carta” became the Japanese “karuta”, and caught on well among the wealthy samurai. The isolationist Tokugawa shogunate soon banned them as a foreign influence, however, and so playing cards in Japan took on their own particular evolution, as printers and gamers worked around the restrictions.
Variant decks multiplied, fusing older indigenous Japanese gaming traditions and innovating new ones. Some of those older traditions involved matching paintings on shells, or poems on squares of wood, and translated easily to paper cards. These poetry cards and other literary variants became popular educational tools for children.
The card ban wasn’t formally lifted until late in the Meiji period, when Japan was “westernizing”. Clandestine cardplayer Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo in 1889 and began manufacturing the popular Hanafuda (“Flower Game”) deck, which has 12 suits of 4 cards each.
I imagine that Nintendo, innovative from the start, was among those early 20th century card manufacturers to produce “obake karuta”, card decks depicting mythological monsters (“obake”) and their names and attributes. Sound familiar?
After the Second World War, Nintendo also began making western-style playing cards and began to branch out into toys and other goods. The first mega-hit toy product was, uncannily enough, an extending arm based on the pantograph — another printing-related hit in the story. From there, toy-making brought the company into electronics in the early 1970s, and from there, card pips turn to pixels and then once again we come to Pokemon.
So from East, to West, to East again, and then to global cultural dominance, the humble playing card moves, shakes, and shapes the world. Are we ultimately so sure it’s us playing them, I wonder, or is our game perhaps also playingus?
Based in Miami, Florida, printer/teacher Tom Virgin of Extra Virgin Press appears on the Art & Company podcast. He talks about introducing the tangible craft of printing to students in the classroom and about the future of printing at large. Come take a listen!
Next up is the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule project. This nifty concept is a printing (and history) lover’s dream. It is a small, portable collection that celebrates type & printing.
The Museum contains unique printing artifacts & resources spanning decades. The fit-on-your-bookshelf Museum features cast pieces of hot-metal, wood, and metal foundry type, scale-model replica of a California Job case and many more items to discover.
The project is helmed by Seattle, Washington-based Glenn Fleishman and in collaboration with many artists, printers, museums, and foundries.
We hope you explore some of our links and perhaps share in our enjoyment about what intrigues us here at Boxcar Press. Email us at info@boxcarpress.com with the things that inspire you as well!
For our ninth year, we here at Boxcar Press have enjoyed the honor of supporting this year’s 2019 Seattle Children’s Hospital Broadside project. It is helmed by Sierra Nelson and Ann Teplick of the Writers in the Schools program (WITS) and the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. This year’s creative young poets and printer/artists joined forces to build a magnificent collection of 20 broadsides in a limited run of 110 editions.
The works of arts are a collaboration of kindhearted printers bringing alive the thoughts of long-term patients from the Seattle Children’s Hospital. The result is nothing short of fun, colorful, whimsical, and inspiring. This first installment of a two-part blog highlights four printers who share their creative processes and showcase the magic of the children’s writing. Enjoy!
When we gathered at SVC to kick off this year’s series with the reading of the kid’s poems, I was convinced Gerald was a real llama. I wasn’t alone. After Ann Teplick (one of the lead poets for this project) finished reading Liam’s poem, she said she’d met Gerald. “He’s real?” another printer asked. “Oh no,” she replied. “He’s a stuffed toy, but he seems real.” Liam’s words had brought Gerald to life, a feeling that stuck with me through the creative process. We spent a lot of time together, me and Gerald. And he is quite a lovable little stinker.
Sketches of Gerald (all photos courtesy of Amy Redmond)
His larger-than-life personality demanded the same dominating presence on the page. Picturing a simple illustration with a large color background, I set about figuring out how to turn the sketch into a reduction cut.
Reduction cut study: using my office door as a lightbox.
Not wanting to leave anything to chance, I tested my sketches on a small 2×3 inch linoleum block and printed a run of 200 so that I could play with color & the reduction cut process. Remember how I said Gerald was a stinker? Yep. He bit me. Twice. (Some may say my carving tool slipped, but they weren’t there. Gerald knows what he did.)
Gerald feigns innocence as he regards my bandaged fingers.
These tests were really informative. I quickly learned how opaque white ink would look on the cream-colored paper: in short, not as I expected. To make Gerald appear “white” I found it best to shift from my original plan of printing his entire body in white, to only printing the suggestion of his curly locks. I also played with the background color, and how to best define Gerald’s outline. These “Gerald trading cards,” as I came to view them, were later sent out to members of the Amalgamated Printers Association in the monthly letterpress bundle.
Mini reduction cut studies of Gerald.
I like to create full size mock-ups to nail down the details before getting on press. The design of the broadside didn’t change much from these 2×3″ tests to the final 9×12 image; just a little rotation of the angle at which Gerald would be peeking out of the corner, in order to make room for the type.
My full-size sketch of the broadside.Carving the first part of a 3-part reduction cut.
The first pass through the press was Gerald’s curls and face. To prep my platen press (a 13×19 motorized Colt’s Armory), I let it run with opaque white ink for about 20 minutes to draw out any trace remains of other ink hiding in the rollers. I cleaned it with Putz Pomade and roller wash, and inked it up again with opaque white and began printing. The effect was subtle, but enough to make the non-printed parts of the page appear “whiter” than they actually were.
The subtle effects of opaque white on a cream-colored paper.
Carving the second part of the reduction cut was easy, even if Gerald wasn’t thrilled to receive the haircut. Removing his curls was deliciously satisfying.
Gerald begrudgingly gets shorn.
I decided — with the help of an informal Instagram poll comparing my test prints — to set Gerald on a blue background, rather than a green one. At one point it was going to be a split fountain of the 2, but that was just a symptom of indecision.
Passes 2 (blue) and 3 (gray) of the reduction cut aren’t well-documented, but I did snag a photo of my alignment tests on make-ready from previous year broadsides. In these 4 prints you can see evidence of Home Life(2017), Self-Portrait Poem (2016), How to Fix a Laptop (2015), and Favorite Things (2013).
Re-using make-ready from older print runs can yield some fun results.
The fourth and final pass through the press was the metal type, printed in the same gray as Gerald’s eyes, nose, mouth, and outline. The title was set in Boul Mich, a typeface designed by Chicago’s Ozwald Cooper in the spirit of the trendy Broadway typeface of the 1920s. The body and colophon are set in Spartan, my house sans-serif face.
Gerald gets a good scrub during his type wash bath.
Working with Liam’s poem was a treat, and things that are important to Liam are clear in his description of his beloved confidante: strength, tenderness, and a co-conspirator willing to weather the highs and lows of life. May we all be so lucky to have someone like Gerald, stinky as he may be, by our side.
The finished print, in which Gerald smiles for his close-up.
Demian Johnston
Every year as I contemplate and work on this project, it has tremendous importance to me. Yet, I never feel like I do enough. Some artists meet their poets or the poet’s family if the poet had passed. I have never done that. I don’t know if my heart can handle it. I have done 5 or 6 of these. I have cried each time. Even the funny poems hit me and not for any specific reason, although I experience so many feelings. It’s simply just how human the poems are.
You get this unique, precious look into another person’s life—and sometimes death. It’s a rare thing, especially in this era of phony social media where our curated personalities pretend to connect with others. I really wish I had taken more photos, particularly of process photos of my last print but I did have some fun with this one. I used Boxcar plates for all of my printing.
I had played with clean lines and texture. I ended up printing everything clean and then carved away parts of the plates. I used sandpaper and wood cut knives to distress the plates and then I overprinted again. I also wiped away a little ink on each pass. I wanted there to be some “grit” below the surface.
The poem is clean and neat. It’s really tight but there is some real agony beneath it. Happiness, too… but I wanted to lean into the darkness without doing something traditionally dark. As always, I feel very lucky to be part of this project and to exercise my skills.
My poem was an excerpt of a longer poem, written by Isaac Gardner, age 24. I was lucky and got to meet him a few weeks before I started the project. He was incredibly open and excited about seeing his poem in print.
Isaac’s poem was very powerful, and the excerpt I had was in reference to darkness and light, and how he had a star in his pocket that grew brightly as he called upon it for help in the darkness.
I was immediately drawn to the star, and to creating a dark, stormy background with a path of light cutting through. I’m interested in textures and colors as opposed to using literal images, but did use a star as a sort of centerpiece. Boxcar made the poem excerpt in polymer, and the rest of the broadside was done by hand.
I began by making a linoleum cut of a star and printing it as my first pass. Next I created a collagraph–I mounted bookboard and painted it with acrylic medium with brush strokes for texture. This was my second pass.
For the third pass, I wanted to make a dark area to surround the star, and so hand-cut linoleum sheets mounted to a piece of shelving, and printed this background in a dark bluish color over the textured collagraph. I had to make sure the blue was transparent enough to show the texture while still being dark and moody. It was tricky!
Finally, I printed the polymer plate with the excerpt of the poem in a dark reddish color to contrast with the blue.
I was happy with the overall result! And was thrilled to meet Isaac and participate in this meaningful project. Thank you Boxcar!
In the spring of 2019, myself and a lucky group of other letterpress printers gather to be part of the Children’s Hospital Broadside Project. This was the ninth year of the project. We listen as the poems are read and choose (and sometimes negotiate) which poem we will print.
Sierra and Ann are able to share a little bit about each poet and I learned that my young one, Finnley Foster, was already an accomplished rider and had her own horse named Norman. Because she was so young, I wanted to keep the colors of the broadside gay and colorful, suggesting a carousel. And yet, I wanted to keep the horses lifelike because she described them so specifically and because she really knew what horses look like.
I enlisted the help of one of the other printers, Laura Walczak, because she is more savvy than I am with cleaning up images on a computer to get them ready for reproduction and because she has a laser cutter. I found several copyright free images on-line which I thought suited the lines that Finnley had written. Laura was able to work on the images and create the wooden laser cuts in a matter of hours.
I worked out and mixed all the colors in advance to create a harmonious palette for the run of seven colors. I did many mock-ups of hand cuts shapes of the horses before settling on the positions for each one. I printed the text on my Vandercook SP-15 but I printed each of the horses on my 1926 10 x 15 Chandler & Price. The horses required quite a bit of ink to get full coverage on each image and I was able to achieve this more easily on the C&P although it did require some careful paper handling as the sheet was over-sized relative to the press.
Throughout all the press runs, each broadside had a slipsheet laid between them so the ink would not offset from the front to the back of the next. Even so, I laid all the broadsides out on my work table to dry for several days before the final trimming.
At the completion of the project, we gather to read the broadsides to one another and talk about the process of working on them. Then we wrap up a complete set of the broadsides in a portfolio along with ten copies of the poet’s own piece which are later presented to the young poet and/or their family. Because of Finnley’s enthusiastic interest in horses, I gave them all of the laser cuts in case she would like to play with them.
It is both moving and inspiring to be part of this project for nine years. I am grateful I am invited to be even a small part of the young poet’s journey as they are so sweetly encouraged to write by Sierra and Ann. The generous support of businesses like Boxcar Press, Ecological Fibers, Neenah Paper, Puget Bindery and Evolution Press working with all involved makes this possible.
Michele Burgess of Brighton Press is a fine arts book artist, creative soundboard, and part-time university professor who loves to share printing with those around her. For three decades, Michele and her husband have been enjoying the fruits of their collaborative efforts one pulled print at a time.
AN ARTIST BY NATURE I am a visual artist obsessed with working in book form. My husband, Bill Kelly, founded our press in 1985 and it has morphed and grown before our eyes.
THE LURE OF LETTERPRESS I went to the Cranbrook Academy of Art for my MFA in the mid-’80s. There was a very funky letterpress there and small, crumbly piles of type. I enjoy the intentionality, the craft, the beauty of its collaboration with paper.
CREATIVE COLLECTIVE We are a small band of like-minded people using the studio as a creative laboratory. We create and publish collaborative artists’ books that braid the visions of both poets and visual artists. Everything is original and achieved by hand.
Bill Kelly, who founded the press, Nelle Martin, associate director/production designer/letterpress printer and I collaborate creatively with whoever the artist and poet might be. Most often, one of us is one or the other, or, in Bill’s case, both. We also often collaborate with papermakers such as those at Twinrocker, Cave paper, and the Morgan Conservatory to get a certain color or weight that we’re looking for.
Sonja Jones, in her 80’s and a previous librarian, has been a guardian angel and does our boxmaking. Kathi George, our crackerjack copy editor who makes sure we don’t have a plate made with a typo in it. Jenny Yoshida Park also works closely with us on typography and website and catalog design.
Recent poets include Bill Kelly, Chard deNiord, Bianca Stone, and Martha Serpas. Recent artists, besides myself and Bill include: Jinane Abbadi, Ian Tyson, Miya Hannan, Jenny Yoshida Park. A full list of artists and writers can be found on our website—34 years worth.
Sometimes we work with outside bookbinders Mark Tomlinson, Claudia Cohen, and Lisa Van Pelt, who have added creative ideas to the bindings. There’s a lot of back and forth regarding structure and content until it all melds together.
My favorite thing about it is that we never know what the final outcome will be until the B.A.T. (from the French phrase “bon a tirer” — good to pull. The subsequent prints should look like that one) is complete and that we can never remember whose idea certain things were. Synergy.
COAST-TO-COAST PRINTING We are bi-coastal now. We do most of the production in San Diego, which is getting a little less cool every year, and we do a lot of the creative work in Vermont in relative solitude. We also work in other artist’s studios sometimes or at the dinner tables of our writers.
PRINTING MENTORS Gerald Lange, Michael Bixler, Robin Price, Walter Hamady have been my letterpress mentors. William Blake, Sonja Delaunay, Ken Campbell, Anslem Kiefer, and Barbara Fahrner have been my book art mentors. The poets I work with inspire me. I get energy and fortitude from my collaborators at the press.
PART-TIME PRINTING, FULL-TIME FUN We decided years ago not to require the press to support us physically, so we teach at universities part-time.
THE ARTISTIC PROCESSES I start a book from a small kernel of inspiration which is always mysterious in its origin. Sometimes, the poet is my muse or his/her words. From there, I usually start working on visual images that expand on, rather than illustrate the text. The best scenario is when the poet and I are working together from a kernel and we’re spinning a web together.
PRINTING FEATS I’m proud of the meandering path we’ve taken, despite the hardships. With regards to a project: A Woman Hit by a Meteor. Our paper was MUCH too large for the press, so we folded it and through that limitation were able to imbue it with a sensibility of folded maps in ancient, celestial atlases.
PRESS HISTORY Vandercook 219, old style. I love the Vandercook, the sound, the weight, the intuitive simplicity of the machine.
BOXCAR’S ROLE Boxcar has helped us realize some visual formats that we couldn’t have done with lead type. Also, we were able to create Arabic calligraphy, Chinese and Japanese text that we couldn’t have done otherwise. Boxcar has been super-efficient, patiently helpful, both with my classroom needs and for Brighton Press.
PRINTING TIPS: Perhaps a useful letterpress printing technique? Slightly more punch, less ink.
WHAT’S COMING NEXT A book called WHERE AND HOW BLOOD WAS MADE with poet Chard deNiord. It will be my most complex book to date.