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.

Letterpress Print Exchange

Last December, Kelly Moran organized a letterpress print exchange between sellers on Etsy. Over 40 people signed up and the prints are due by March 15. I started mine last week — I haven’t made a wood type collage since last summer, so it was fun to plan out the colors and go through my wood type drawer choosing the blocks to use. While I was at it, I decided to do 2 designs, one 8×10 the other 5×7, in several different colorways. Below are 2 of the resulting prints — the one on the far left is for the print swap. The photo to the right shows the set-up for the print run for the first color of the print below right (it looks awfully yellow but is actually green!). Next up is figuring out the titles (that’s probably the best part of the entire process!), numbering and signing them, and finally shipping the swap prints to Kelly.

Print for Letterpress ExchangeAnother wood type collage

Press setup

Armina Ghazaryan’s Wood Type Prints

Armina Ghazaryan’s Stuggling printI keep a small pool of photos on Flickr and I found the photo to the left when looking through some of the groups I belong to. It’s a print by Armina Ghazaryan, a graphic designer living in Gent, Belgium. She made the print from wood type at MIAT, the Museum of Industrial Archaeology and Textile in Gent. (They call themselves “a unique museum that focuses mainly on the fundamental technological changes in our society during the last 250 years.”) But even better are her blog posts about a workshop she took at MIAT last summer. The pictures are great — of the wonderful typographic work of the participants, of old presses, of locked up type. And be sure to scroll down for a look at the photos of a chasse full of lego blocks, all locked up and ready to print.

Around the Block

Around the BlockContinuing with my on-going interest in maps, this is a companion piece to my recent broadside Walk Empty-handed. It’s a limited edition 8″x10″ letterpress print, 17 in all.

The quote is from Robert Motherwell: “If you can’t find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two blocks — but never three.”

Walk Empty-handed

Walk Empty-handed
I designed this new broadside, Walk Empty-handed, after talking to my friend Cathy about quilting and patterns and words. (I wrote about that conversation in this post.) Since then I’ve been playing around with maps and their white spaces. This is a limited edition 8″x10″ letterpress print, 25 in all.

The quote is from José Saramago: “Walk empty-handed, for wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world.”

Quilt -> Broadside -> Book

Walking spread

Recently as my friend Cathy was showing me her latest quilting project, I felt a pang of jealousy and then frustration. She’s been working in fabric and color and with patterns of those colors for a long time and very successfully. I’ve been trying to design broadsides that marry type and patterns of color with little success — type alone or patterns alone yes, but not together. I blurted out “where would you put type or words or a quote in your quilts” and after a minute she said “in the white space between the colors.” I went from frustration to “aha!” Later, in an email, she suggested I look at maps as patterns. From there I was off and running.
I started playing around with shapes from a map and putting words in the roads and streets. Looking through my book of quotes, scanning for ones appropriate to maps, I remembered that many of my own haiku are about my walks. And that’s how my latest book got started. Above is one of the spreads. Below is the resulting book, titled “Walking“. You can see more pictures here.

Walking