Category: Broadside Project

I’m doing a series of broadsides to experiment with my press, type treatments, and various printing methods. I have a gallery of all my finished prints and broadsides on my website.

A Different Palette

My friend Laura gave me a box of her scraps recently — bits of her paintings, paste papers and off cuts. As I sorted through them, I noticed how different her color palette is from the one I usually gravitate toward. Many of the scraps were thin long-ish strips. So I cut one into 1″ squares and re-arranged them into a 4×4 grid. This square looked so unlike my usual collages that I kept going and made 3 more. I put them in a debossed panel on an 8×10 piece of paper with a letterpress printed haiku below. Here they are. You can see all my collages here.

Whispered Preludes #4

Simple Pleasures #5

Spring Puddles #5

Flower #5

Prompt Challenge: Process

The word for my prompt challenge group this month is “process.” It’s got so many possibilities I haven’t known where to start. But I noticed I’ve been paying more attention to how I, and the people around me, go about doing tasks. How I make dinner, how I organize my day, watching my husband repairing some trim in our kitchen…
Recently I’ve been making collages that combine my haiku and my very large box of scrap paper. So I thought I’d photograph the process for a blog post.
First I selected 8 haiku to hand-set in my “house font” Bembo (the only one I have in metal). Then I letterpress printed them on my favorite paper, Hahnemühle Copperplate. Here’s the chase with the haiku all locked up and ready to print.

Ready to print

Next I made a debossed panel above each haiku, using the method here.The collages sit inside the panel. Copperplate is a soft mould-made paper that takes both letterpress and the panel-making technique very nicely.

Making a debossed panel

Before I got started, I dumped all the paper out of my scrap box and organized it by color and the stored the colors in separate large envelopes.

Collage making scraps

Then the fun begins—start cutting and combing the scraps . Most of the scraps are japanese moriki, but some are my own paste papers. Over the past month I’ve made a collage pretty much every day, usually first thing—it’s been a good way to ease into the day, thinking about color and shape combinations.
Once I finish one, I hang it up on one of the long steel rods I’ve affixed to the wall, using magnets. Looking at them this way gives me ideas for future pieces.

Many collages

Here’s a closeup of one of them. To give you an idea of scale, the finished piece is 8×10 and the collage is 4-1/2×4-1/2 inches.

Collage

Prompt Challenge: Exoteric

exoteric. adj; Popular; simple; commonplace.

The Rest is Noise (no 4)This is my 7th prompt challenge word and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. Each week the word has given me multiple new structures or ideas to investigate, and after 7 words the list has gotten quite long. And I’m still working on Turkish Map Fold ideas generated from the very first word! So this week I shoehorned the challenge into something I’m already doing.
Over the past several months I’ve been making collages to use in my calendar design for next year. I make most of my collages on paper that I have letterpress printed a haiku along the bottom. The haiku I thought appropriate for “exoteric” is

Listen around the bustle,
delight in the everyday–
the rest is noise.

The collage pictured is the result. I did another too, which you can see here.
Next word: morceau. n; 1. Piece; morsel. 2. An excerpt or passage of poetry or music.