We thought it may be of interest to post some behind the scenes photos showing work in progress and a bit of our letterpress process. If that's not of interest, then you should probably just bail now... :)
We designed all of these cards in illustrator and printed from photopolymer plates. Our photos are therefore slightly less aesthetically pleasing than if we were using the more traditional print blocks, but we can't just magic those into existence, so here we are.
First off, we photographed the products we were using as inspiration:
We turn this into vector artwork using illustrator:
Then send this off to the fine folk at Centurion Graphics to get this made into a photopolymer plate. Eventually we hope to have this equipment in-house, but right now we just don't have the space:
As can see, we've got plenty more stationery-themed products yet to come. We're hoping to launch some larger prints and possibly notebooks at craft markets later this year.
When platemaking, you pay by the total area, so it's cost effective to tesselate as many designs together in a small area as you can. As you can see, we combined the stationery artwork with the lovely Audrey Hepburn print (see previous post). It can be a bit fiddly to cut out each component once the plates arrive, but it's really worth it for the economy, platemaking is one of the more expensive parts of the letterpress process for us.
Next, it's time to get inky!
Scissor plate on press, inked in 'yellow ochre', which on fine lines like this comes out as a beautiful muted gold colour:
Printed scissors and fountain pens drying:
Playing with shades of blue:
We started off with a cyan-ish blue for the fountain pen, but then went lighter:
We also like to experiment with the placement of the image on the card, sometimes it takes a few goes to get it right. Here's a rejected position for the fountain pen:
Shades of grey (leave it)...
Pencil plate inked in magenta:
We also printed the pencil card in yellow. This isn't available for sale yet, as we were thinking it looked a bit too light against the white card. It's growing on us though, so it may yet put in an appearance!
It's amazing how the look of the ink varies when it's being mixed, rolled out, then on the plate and on the final card. It makes it harder than you might think to achieve exactly the colour one is looking for. Especially as I often have no real idea what I'm looking for when I first start mixing!!
Black pencil army:
The range stacked up for creasing and packing. As we're consummate professionals, this is usually done of an evening whilst watching a film:
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