arepeatingloop

ok... so i'm doing an art print for some good friends who have started this awesome business venture called P is for Panda. you can read what they are about right here. good stuff.

so here's where i need your help. as part of being the designer of the print, i get to decide which charity a portion of the profit from the sale of the print goes to. i'm having a bit of a time deciding exactly who i want to donate to. i've thought about donating to AIDS research/relief effort and charities like one.org or blood:water mission. but i've also thought it would be really awesome to donate to some kind of charity for arts education. my high school art education kinda burned me out... and i think in some ways it's because i had the same art teacher all four years and the curriculum wasn't anything to write home about... whatever... i'm sure some schools don't even have art programs. i came across a site for the georgia art education association, which might work... but i also want to make sure the money that Panda donates is actually going to go good use. does anybody have any suggestions?

also, i'm going to try and blog/document the whole process of making the print. check here or themiottis.tumblr.com if you interested in any of that.



for the print i want to do a "makeready" style design. my first step was to gather some images i thought would look cool or have been some of my favorite things to use during my time at Hatch Show Print. after getting together some rough ideas, i decided to pull some vellum proofs to get an idea of where i was headed.




the thing about makeready or "test" prints is that they are somewhat experimental in nature and i want to stay true to that. i also like things that don't reveal everything at once but when you inspect them closer they reveal more than you thought was initially there. that's part of the beauty of letterpress... feeling the impression that type or carved images leave on paper or playing with transparent inks can be half the fun of a design.

before getting too ahead of myself, i knew i wanted to somehow incorporate the P is for Panda logo in the design somewhere. so about 1pm or so, today, i started carving the panda head logo out of linoleum.




the thing about the logo is i want to try and "hide" it somewhere in the finished product. more of that hidden layer stuff i was nerding out about above.

next, i decided to print these on two different paper stocks. chipboard and this really intriguing light blue paper that had been laying around the shop for a while. for the first layer i decided to print this floral looking background that is a favorite block of the staff at Hatch. this block was originally carved to be the background for a rolling stones tour poster in the 80's but ultimately the job got killed and we all that remains of it is this gorgeous block.



since the theme of this post seems to be "hidden layers" and fun with transparent inks, i should inform you that i printed the first layer using a mix of mostly transparent white and a dab of opaque creamy yellow to give the ink a "varnish" look. if you hold the paper a certain way you almost can't see that there is ink on it at all.

this print will end up being 4 colors (if you can call the first layer a color.) one down. three to go.