tysonpease

Time for another glimpse of my work! This series of pieces is based in the Alice books to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’s first publication.

Earlier this month I got to take part in this year’s festival to plead for skills. The setting: Pickwick Independent Press. The task: get this old AB Dick 360 offset printer up and running.

When in its zone it can crank out hundreds of copies in no time. Combined with the kind of plates it uses, it could be great for comics.

Pilar was in charge of getting the machine working / pleading for the skills of someone more knowledgable and experienced in such a task. I worked on a sample plate in case she succeeded.

…Unfortunately, I can’t say we ended up with lots of sleeping Alice prints by the end of the day. Or any.

But a good time and an inordinate amount of cookies were had by all. The following is an apt summary of my experience. (I didn’t see Pilar’s, but it might be NSFW.)

New artwork! I’m excited to show these off—all six of them. One didn’t get fanned out for its sneak peek in this photo. Whoops!

Major excitement in Tyson Land. My newest comic is finally done and off to the printer’s! This one was a labor of love, that’s for sure. In the meantime, here’s the cover art.

Each comic I make has its own special place in my heart. But this one might have a bigger-than-normal-sized place. I can’t wait to share it. It’ll debut it at this year’s TCAF.

I'm going…

to TCAF TWENTY FIFTEEN!

This year's Toronto Comic Arts Festival is May 9-10, and I'm super-excited to have a table there for the first time—so excited that I've decided to debut new work there!

In this week's Waldoboro Farmers Market vendor profile, I talk with Judy about salmon for 300 and smell-obsessed dogs.

In my sixth Waldoboro Farmers Market vendor interview, Tim and I talk about quality of life and the effects of being interested in… everything.

From my fifth interview of Waldoboro Farmers Market vendors. Marjie tells me about Maine's eventual acceptance of goat dairy products and some of the artistry / magic of making cheese.

An Experiment in Printmaking, Part 4: the prints

After all that work, the final Lucky Fox prints are done! They're also available for sale *wink wink*.

Like I mentioned in the last printmaking post, the white-to-dark blue rainbow roll treatment really helped emphasize the cool feel of the comic's snowy setting. A lovely turnout, if I do say so myself.

An Experiment in Printmaking, Part 3: the production

I've been fortunate enough to meet Lisa Pixley of Pickwick Independent Press in Portland, Maine. With a little of her printmaking expertise and assistance (read: a lot), I ran my first series of Lucky Fox prints.

The printing itself took maybe 20 minutes, but the time in the studio was a good four hours of getting to know the machine, readying the plate, testing and adjusting its placement for centered printing, trying different inks, and cleaning all those rolls (twice).

We used a proofing press, a machine originally meant for quick letterpress editing that has found a wealth of function for visual and print artists. Lots of intimidating parts and pieces for someone used to handling a paintbrush and pen. But it was oh-so-satisfying to clunk-a-chunk those mechanical parts when rolling out each print.

You'll also notice that things got a little fancy with a color-blending trick called a "rainbow roll" in printmaking circles. The white-to-blue really captured that frosty snowscape feel.