West Meets East, and Back Again

My normal day is waking up at 8, eating a blueberry bagel with nothing on it, drinking a Dr. Pepper, taking my vitamin, watching 30 Rock on DVD, making my lunch, and then riding my bike about 2.3 miles to Hatch Show Print.

At Hatch I do all the stuff that you have seen pictures of or read about. After that, I usually end up riding my bike to one to 3 places. The first is to Grimey's record store for a free concert. The second, is back to my house, the third is to the east side.

I live on the west side, but all the other interns live on the east, so instead of having 3 interns ride their backs to my side, I ride my bike to theirs. I don't really mind though. I believe that I ride around 10 miles a day this way, and as a result I am a much stronger rider. Usually when I go to the east side, I don't end up riding my bike back to the west side till around 11:30. Tonight, I got home around 1:45am. This gives me a nice peaceful quiet ride home(with the exception of Broadway, and Church Street bars.). It also gives me a nice view of the city at night from the top of the pedestrian bridge (almost) all alone. Here are a few quick pics of the city from the pedestrian bridge at around midnight, and Hatch Show Print's neon sign on Broadway around the same time.

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.

How to Make a Poster/My First Poster

I know that this is about a month too late at this point, but I lost my camera for a month which means these photos are just now seeing the light of day. This is a step by step of the poster making process and by coincidence, they are also pictures of my first poster.

After you get the client you give them a call and check in with them to let them know whats up. You talk about colors and the plans for the poster, and bounce any ideas off of them to see what they want or don't want. Some people really don't care, and trust you completely, other people want very specific things.

After you call them, you sketch out a few thumbnail type sketches on index cards. Once you get one that you think looks the best, you get a board to work on and you build it one letter, or block at a time.
When that is finished you hand brayer it with ink, and transfer it onto tissue paper. It is very similar to making a relief print.
Once you do that it is no longer backwards and you get a good idea of what you should look like or change. In this case the words "the" and "Low" seemed to be too awkward, so I changed it around and did another proof.
Most people want to see what the proof looks like before they have 100 or so of them printed. This is where the fax machine comes in. Since most of our clients are out of state we send a fax instead. We don't do email because we're living in the 1800's over here. You go down to FEDEX reduce the size, photocopy it, and then go back to the shop and fax it to the client. Once you get approval you break down the color separations by hand onto separate boards. In this case I had 2 colors. One board had all the pieces that would be blue, and one board had everything black.
This is what the print looks like after running the blue. My edition was for 250, so I had to run the press 250 times for blue, then run it all over again for the black.

Here is the final product(before being trimmed down) after the black as been run. For this design I had to carve the windmill block by hand from a design submitted by the client.

I am pretty happy with the result, and the manager of the band said that the posters are selling really well.

Barack Obama Looking at Awesome Things

Here is a link to a collection of photoshopped images by Dean Trippe. It is Barack Obama, looking at awesome stuff.

Just a perk of being president.

Hatch Show Print on American Routes.

Way back in the first or second week of the internship te radio show "American Routes" came into the shop and did some interviewing and recording. So tune into American Routes the week of April 7th, and listen to the sounds of a 131 year old letterpress print shop in action!! You might even hear me describe a problem I had with the registration of a print, or the sound of me printing( I think I was the only one who was printing that day). Then again, it might have been cut.

FACT!

Letterpress printmaking started a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
J/K ROFL!

Speed? Baloney.

By now this is pretty much old news, but every time it somehow wanders back into my consciousness via facebook, or Leo weekly it just infuriates me. I wanted to kind of keep it to myself for the most part because I am not a part of it, and I don't live there, but I was a Louisville artist, and I will be again in about 3 more weeks, so it kind of impacts me.

For those who don't know, or need a refresher click HERE and HERE.

I may just be a simple printmaker, but I think that if these artists were so concerned about how much art supplies they could take off their taxes then they were doing it wrong. It is a donation because you don't get anything out of it except for the satisfaction of helping the cause, which in this case was art education related programs. You know them right? The ones that get cut every year when the schools have to cut budgets?

My understanding is that this was an open call, not a mandatory exhibition. Meaning you didn't have to do it!! C'mon artists, I'm sure most of you grew up during, or at least existed in the '80's. When you don't want to donate your artwork to art education programs do like the Reagan's "Just Say NO!"

Is selling baloney really going to change people's minds about...wait...what is it you want from this? Different tax laws for artists, or to force people to charge more for donated pieces even though you see none of the money, or to not be solicited to as much? I guess it will keep people from asking you to donate your work to causes. I mean if there is one thing that artists hate it is being a part of social change, and helping people. It's all about cold hard cash, and tax breaks! "All for one and one for none!!" I should make that into an 8 1/2 x 11 one color print...and then sell it for 300 dollars, because I'm worth it.

That's why I got into art. Who cares if a bunch of kids won't have the chance to experience a better art education. My 5 X 7 work is worth more than $27 dollars, and I can only claim a small amount on my taxes, and sigh, so many people are like, making me read emails about donations!

To me it just sounds like a bunch of whining stuck up artists who apparently can't say no, and don't care enough to donate to a cause that sounds like it is pretty much directly related to what they want to do for a living. I guess having a bunch of kids who never get to experience art will thin the heard out a little when they get older. The less art education that children have, the less educated artists there will be in the gallery world 2 decades from now.

This isn't Duchamp's "fountain" questioning what art is in the gallery world, this is a fundraiser for children who would could have had the potential of an extra $2025 in art education money raised if a group of artists submitted the actual artwork that they seem to be so proud of instead of lunch meat.

I just wonder how many of these artists will be willing to boycott/protest/lunch-meatify one of the many $20 and under shows that spring up over the year.