We love wood type!

We love wood type and got a crazy mixed  load of it. Back in the day, someone was trying to sell it by the letter and sticker priced every letter--even the 6 line type AND its punctuation right down to the periods and commas. Yikes! You think it would be so quick to sort but there are so many nuances!! So many variations of Gothic wood type, it will make your head spin! Of course we are trying to font it so that we can print with it but we are not sure how complete the sets will be...

Yay...the exhibition is up!

The Power of the Press is an exhibit on of prints and collaborative media at the Chandler Center for the Arts. The artist reception is Friday 9/26 at 7:00 pm so if you are in the area, stop by and say hello. There will also be an artists' lecture on 9/30 at 7:00 pm.
A few months ago Lisa Takata and I set off on a creative adventure at The Paper Studio to use the Power of the Press in every imaginable dimension. We collected piles of colorful recyclable materials including bubble wrap, candy wrappers, mesh vegetable bags, plastic shopping bags, used sewing patterns, tissue paper and overhead transparencies. Using a heat press, we morphed the structure, texture and form of these materials by melting them together at high temperatures to create translucent, multi-layered surfaces for printmaking. We letterpress printed everything--from the tissue patterns to the melted plastic all of which were hand-cut or die-cut into a series of repeating forms. Each component piece was hand printed, varnished, pressed, melted, folded, ironed, and heat pressed numerous times. Although the resulting work incorporates familiar shapes, colors and text, the ingredients we started with are hardly recognizable. Here's some quick pics of the collaborative pieces--Swarm Pattern and Daily Candy. Also, Lisa and I each did two pieces in response to this work. I'll post them and more details later! Swarm Pattern
(detail) Daily Candy
(detail)
(detail)

Fabulous Class with DJ & Deryn

We had a fabulous class with DJ and Deryn near the end of June. The weekend kicked off with a trunk show by the artists. It was terrific for the artists and we appreciated all the people attending!

The amazing two-day class featured painting and wire work.

It was great to see our local friends a well as meet a number of people who flew from out-of-state: Oklahoma, Idaho, Florida, Nevada, Texas...

The Phoenix Downtown Magazine Cover

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!

Misprint Type--This Site Rocks!

I know this site has blogged about for months but I wanted to make sure our readers were aware of it. I love the collage work of Eduardo Recife, an artist who was born in 1980, Belo Horizonte (MG) Brazil. He started his own site project back in 1998, titled Misprinted Type. The site consisted in basically showcasing his experimental typefaces and artwork. Things got bigger and in 2003, Recife launched the 2nd version of Misprinted Type and for that he won recognition in lots of magazines, books and websites.

There is so much fun stuff on this site--collage, fonts, drawings, photos... you'll get deliriously lost! Plus there is lots of fab free fonts (say that 3 times really fast) that you can download. Go to his link on projects and watch Invisible--a scrolling poem with music--I just love it!


Here's a couple of pieces that are on his commercial site that were commissioned by HBO's Assume the Position.