#lead type

[image description: photos of a letterpress printed broadside of a poem by a pediatric patient, as part of the yearly publication of poetry from the Writer’s in the Schools Program at Seattle Children’s Hospital. This poem is called Black Panther, the Night Hunter. It illustrates the black panther as if in low light, with a combination of fuzzy-edged, textured pressure printing and handset type for the panther's spots. the text and panther's eye are printed in metallic silver. full text under the cut. end description.]

WIP

done with this year's Words of Courage broadside! WoC is a yearly publication of poetry broadsides written by patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and designed, printed, and bound into portfolios by local letterpress & book artists. this year’s whole edition will be scanned and posted there in a couple weeks & previous years are always there to see!

this one was pretty nerve wracking for me because i did a lot of things i'm not really used to but at end i think it's good! and feedback has been positive so i'm working on believing it. i can say with certainty that i loved this poem the instant i saw it, and i did my best to make a panther that matched it. fearless, cool, tangible but not tame.

All the background is basically a series of tone plates (blank lino block) and a single multi-layer pressure plate pass (and a touch plate to deepen the dark background under the poem). The poem & the eye are handset type printed in silver, and the panther's spots are a whole bunch of handset pieces masked off to trap to the silhouette of the panther from the pressure print.

pressure printing is extremely simple as a process but i guess how i would say it is. my comfort zone is usually complex but reliable processes. not a huge fan of surprises in the output. control freak behavior. and the concession to control that i made was, basically, i planned it so all the tone plates and pressure printing went on first and if it wasn't layering the way i wanted, or wasn't getting the effect of low-light nighttime values that i wanted, i could ripcord out and pivot to a more known quantity without losing any good printing that i'd already done. and if the gray values just weren't adding up be to dark enough I could also just keep adding tone plate passes until i achieved sufficient contrast for the silver, as much of a pain as that would've been.

there was in fact about a week where i thought i would just have re-do the whole composition so that the fuzzy pressure print, the panther, etc., was all confined to a discrete box on one side of the sheet, and i would have to print black on clean white for the text. i just never wanted the poem to disappear in the mid value ranges—BUT a fellow printer friend and several other people really encouraged me to go with it, just push the darkness on the left as much as i could and do the touch plate and such. i'm glad i listened because flooding the whole sheet really is the way to make the panther seem unconfined, like it could approach you. in another context i also wouldn't have questioned the way the silver text can disappear at some angles, and pops out with shine at others; camouflage is completely appropriate. I just got anxious because the poet & their poem is obviously the most important part of this project in particular, but i regained confidence in it as an appropriate text treatment the closer it got to being finished.

i think i had the absolute least trust in the process when all the background was printed, and the poem, and the colophon, and i just thought, oh no, this isn't going to be anything :( but then i put that big shiny eye on and suddenly i knew it was going to be good :) still had the spots left to print but that's the one thing i've practiced a lot and i could envision it clearly. that was of course the real source of my anxiety during the whole thing. nothing technically out of the ordinary here, but i'm not practiced in envisioning so much variable texture, and i have little confidence in my taste with textural ranges. what if i simply don't know what Good looks like?? perhaps. must do it first to learn it, nerves included. Can't always be panthers.

I was cleaning out my tumblr drafts and found this which I had intended to post...but didn’t.  

This is from last October when I finally sorted out the few mixed lots sets of lead type I bought on eBay. I put them in one of the double yankee job cases I bought a few years back. 

[image description: photos of a small 4x4 inch letterpress print. text adapted from dictionary definitions of “milk teeth,” temporary, deciduous teeth in young mammals; and “deciduous,” 1. shed at a certain stage of the life cycle. 2. ephemeral, transient. the print also has the small shape of a tooth cut out of the sheet. Photos also of the forme of relief handset type used to print the text, where every letter and space is an individual piece assembled by hand, the small cutting die used to punch out the shape of the tooth, and all the little paper teeth removed from the prints, as little half-inch tooth confetti. End description.]

Had these as little die cutting demos at the Tacoma Wayzgoose last week but there’s a stack leftover so I finished them out! Related to some other stuff I’ve done, obviously. Sort of a series of studies for a bigger project I’m slowly pulling together. If you want the removed tooth along with the print there’s a button for that :)

Etsy

[image description: photos of a 4x6 inch postcard/small print, letterpress printed from handset type. it says "head UP, feet down; the Sun doesn't wait for you to get your boots on," and has a rough shape of sun rays built from large is, ls, and !s. in handset type, each letter and space is a separate piece, assembled into a rectilinear form and then redistributed back into individual pieces after printing. end description.]

etsy

cooper black, venus extended, etc. wanted to do something quick and a little rougher before Wayzgoose, and then felt like i had to wait to post until it got a little sunny again.

[image description: photos of a small print done letterpress from handset type. it's a trifold with round corners. closed, it's 3.5x5 inches. extended, it's 10 inches of 12 pt. type, a stream of consciousness about all the unspoken details that could be underneath using "any pronouns"; it starts legibly in green and fades to nearly unreadable transparency by the end. at the end it says "this doesn't fit on a nametag." full text under the cut. photos also of the form of handset type used to print it, where every letter and space is an individual piece of lead cast in relief, assembled by hand for the project and then distributed back into individual pieces after. end description.]

etsy

i usually let the text sit longer, go back to it, edit more, before i set anything. but i guess it's appropriate that here i, mm, upchucked it all in a note over about two hours, let it devolve into incoherency, and didn't mess around trying to over-work it the next day. just let it be what it is & set.

Anzeigen Grotesk, Alternate Gothic, bulk in Tannhauser. Very happy to be able to use the Tannhauser, which is one of my favorite faces for its own qualities but also for sentimental reasons, being one of my mother's favorites first. I've got well over enough for this—probably three full founts in the case—although not quite enough Didot spacing, not in the whole shop :/ and no larger sizes of the face, so it's tough to implement in most commissioned projects.

anyway! this is sort of a coming out for me in an extremely anticlimactic way. i've been answering when asked and introducing myself to new people as such for a while but frankly i didn't meet new people that often until recently, and i mostly didn't mention it to anybody who knew me already. just been percolating on it. didn't feel pressed before to change my way of being around anyone or make any prints about it. then it did press, sort of suddenly & strangely. lots of reasons for that which i could speculate on but shan't.

always grateful to anybody who bothers to read all the dang words i put on one of these, it's a lot, and i've seen several responses to it now, all very gratifying or sweet or funny or kind in their own way. as always i was worried that this meant nothing outside of my head, but certainly it's proven to be one of those things where, in being as specific to myself as possible, it's come back around to being something other people can see in themselves.