Tis the season--nothing gets done in a vacuum here at The Paper Studio I must say! Really almost everything we do is a team effort and it's great for me that I get to work with many talented artists--specifically--Mike O'Connor on this project who teaches our letterpress classes, started the Amalgamated Printers' Association (APA) & is still on the board and publishes the most popular online letterpress newsletter--Galley Gab.We were asked to be the December cover for the Phoenix Downtown magazine and we jumped at the chance. Thanks Forrest!
(the cover is the magazine's offset version of our print) We have been acquiring some wood type and old vintage letterpress cuts so wanted to do a retro looking piece utilizing both the cuts and wood type. We didn't have a lot of time to get everything together so I came up with 3 different schemes with three colors that I thought would be interesting to print. The look on Mike's face as I was rattling off the 3 totally different ideas (to print in one session, mind you) was priceless--incredulous but priceless. Life is definitely that balance of ying & yang--Mike is there to bring some reality to my hair-brained ideas.
We first laid out all the cuts to form a map. This was after I spent the day before running all the cuts through the Nolan proofing press to make sure they would print. You never know with some of the old cuts. We still had to do some interesting packing to make them all print at the same time.
Next we left the cuts that would be printed green.
Then switched the cuts out that would be printed blue.
Finally the red layer for the wood type.
We used crane's lettra and it was interesting on the deep punch how the lower layers etched though. 
A fun printing day had by all!
