Since Mike put the kibosh on my printing three ideas at one time--i.e. talking some common sense into me, I still needed to get those ideas worked out of my head and onto paper. They just took different directions with different projects. I wanted to do a series of snowflakes with three ink runs over handmade blue jean paper--for a project with a them of blue--could you have guessed that?
I made a plate with chipboard snowflakes that we die cut and glued down and made type-high.
Here's Donna on her maiden run on the
Vandercook. See how her clothes coordinate with the project? It always seems that I'm wearing the color of ink I'm printing that day. I figure it's a biological mimicry strategy so if I get ink on me, then no one will know ;) We printed the front side of the paper with 3 colors and the back side with only the dark snowflake color. We rotated the paper each pass to get movement on the page in terms of shape and color.
We started with the darkest color ink first and they went to opaque lighter inks. I love the tone on tone!
The last layer we printed wood type in white for the text--it's a
cinquain poem titled
Winter Blue. It was a long printing day with a couple of snafus during the day but near the end I was generally elated. I exclaimed to Donna--"W
e make a great team"! I thought so because we never printed together and it worked out so well.
"
Not really" was her reply as she didn't miss a beat and kept printing. I almost coughed up a lung and totally burst out laughing when she said that--she has such dry sense of humor! She explained that snafus might not happen if we were a better team--or she had more experience printing. I think about every
editioned project we do whether its
papermaking, letterpress, bookbinding--sometimes it goes smooth as glass and other times snafus & hiccups are bound to happen--you run out of the right letters of type, there can be a last minute typo, the packing on the press changes, sheets won't form, glue won't dry, Federal Express is closing in 15 minutes, etc. You just have to adjust where you can while maintaining the original intent and keep on going. The final outcome is the reward. By the way, she is the best art partner!
