Jammin' to Beat the Blues

Here are photos of one of my prints completed here at Hatch Show Print. It is for an annual benefit concert put on for the Mental Health Association of Middle Tennessee. It was one of my hardest prints to complete. There are a few reasons that I say this. For one, the amount of type used on this print was more than I had ever had to set before. The sponsor list alone took me hours to set. The second reason is that I destroyed the hours of work it took to set the type because I didn't "wipe my ass" as Jim calls it. This means that I forgot to check and make sure everything was ok before I started printing.

What had happened was that I unlocked everything, asked Brad a question, and then went back to printing. Since it was all unlocked when the drum of the press rolled over the loose type, it just crushed everything and pushed it all over the place instead of keeping it nice and neat. Essentially, I had to reset the poster, but this time I didn't have to pick out the letters because they were all piled at the end of the bed.

The picture above is the finished product.The third reason this poster gave me such a hard time was because of work-ups. A work-up is when a piece of furniture works its way up out of the type causing it to accidentally be printed, when all it was supposed to do is stay low as a spacer. In the picture above you can see the mysterious purple squares that have worked their way into my design as work-ups. Because of the amount of work-ups in this poster that I didn't catch in time, I only had 3 extras after the whole run was finished, and the 150 quantity order was filled. That isn't even enough for the collectors.
The other day as I rode my bike to work, I noticed this on the door. It's my poster in its natural environment!! Michaela says she saw them all over the place this weekend while she was walking around downtown. It's a pretty cool feeling to see something you have created hanging on doors, or windows, or to hear about how much people like it, or how well it is being sold. Even with all the trouble this print caused me, I feel like I learned a lot from it, and I am proud of the finished product.