Monday, August 03, 2009
Invitations part II
These here invitations are for my mom's youngest brother and his fiance. It's been almost 20 years since anyone in my mom's family of 9 children has brought in a new sibling-in-law, and everyone is pretty excited.
I worked with them on making a hand-drawn design. My uncle is an engineer, so when I sent them the sketches with a four-petaled flower, he asked if it could have five petals to be more realistic. I love it! I also hand-drew their names.
I love how these turned out, and Pat and Cara love them too. That said, they were a bit of a problem. Printing hot pink and orange on my press in my acrylic letterpress inks is A NIGHTMARE. And because my press is so small, I had to print the top gray text on one run, the bottom gray text on another run, and the 2 orange flowers each on their own run. And I could not get the oranges to behave properly.
All this strife has caused me to change inks. I'm going rubber based. I've done a lot of research, and I think it's going to improve so many things for me. First I'll be able to print something with yellow in it. It's been breaking my heart that I can't really use anything with yellow--this means no orange, no limey greens, no nothing because the Daniel Smith relief printmaking yellows just stink. They get all sticky and clumpy on the press and ball up. No amount of water mixing helps, and you have to take the chase out and rework the ink every 5 or so impressions. It's terrible!
The other major bonus with rubber based is that you can print and immediately stack the prints. What? Yes. They dry instantly. The oh-so-kind Kathy at Boxcar Press assures me this is what they do all the time and when really busy, they print and ship in an hour's time.Now, I'm from the show me state, so I will indeed have to see this in action, but I'm super excited about it!
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Stunning!
I did a linocut recently, and used oil-based ink for the first time so that I could also watercolor the image and I thought of you. I wondered, "hmmmmm. What does Beth use in her super-cool press?". Because, WOW!, let me tell you that oil takes a LOOOONG time to dry and I cursed when I started panting it the next day and *still* smudged it! Argh!. Would the rubber ink work for my hand-printed linocuts? Do tell! And would the rubber be resistant to watercolor over. I must say, hiccups or not, that the watercolor over the contrast-y linocut was AWESOME and I certainly want to do it again. :-)
Wow! So great! I love these invites! Great design and layout!
I have a few cans of rubber based ink I bought from boxcar to do my wedding invitations - I used just about a table spoon of each to test mixing colors and realized I didn't have the experience to use them. I switched to block printing inks.
That being said - I'm not discouraging you from using them :) I'm saying, that was the first time I'd done any letter pressing and it was extremely non professional. BUT, I do have a few cans that I'm trying to sell in the case you're interested on some discounted inks! I have an opaque white, a blue, and a green.
Does being the girlfriend of someone from the "Show Me State" count? All the more reason to take a trip to see you so I can get a tutorial on new inks.
The invites look great! Funny thing was when I was drawing the flower on my "reuse" package I thought about the realistic 5 petals your uncle advised you on (I actually read this post Sun, but for some reason forgot to comment) I think mine has 7 petals.
gorgeous! please teach a class, i will drive up!
These are truly delicious! Great stuff!!!