We are often asked if multiple ink colors can be used on a single impression. In this video, Jared letterpress prints a phrase about museums showing that 6 ink colors is possible. The phrase “Museums are not neutral” was printed with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple ink using our Washington hand press. The wood type used is 15 line pica in size and the typeface is French Clarendon.
Our museum, like all museums, is not neutral. People often argue that museums should be neutral or that museums can’t be “political.” However, museums actually are cultural institutions that originate from colonial acquisition and they are about power. History is often written by the victors. It is important for museums to focus on multiple sources and perspectives, especially historically underrepresented groups. Promoting diversity is important to understanding a more holistic history of events.
Letterpress print on black linen cloth. 24point clearface heavy. This took 4 hours to set the type btw.
Text reads: “I fantasize about a dildo with nerve endings. I type "how to fuck a partner with my clitoris" into the search bar. The results are articles & reddit posts with tips for helping your boyfriend find your clit. I realy think str8 folks should have to search through dozens of search results about Dyke sex before finding whatever they were actually looking for. Anyway. I imagine pulling my leather harness over my hips, the black silicone connecting just above my clit. They kiss me and trace the scars on my chest. They let me touch them & they touch my silicone, they guide me inside of them. I'm not sure what this would feel like, A dildo with nerve endings does not yet exist. But I know it would be as close to heaven as i'll get.”
50 vogels – a project to print 50 birds each with 16×16 LEGO pieces. Made by Roy Scholten and Martijn van der Blom, 2018. Prints are available to buy, and a book is coming in October. More info available here.
[image description: photos of The Disco Elysium Tarot, printed letterpress in an edition of one from handset lead type and linoleum blocks. It is a complete 78-card tarot deck printed primarily with white text and illustrations on medium grey cardstock, in a custom dark grey hardcase box with a hand-marbled orange and yellow endsheet. The backs of the deck are decorated with an illustration of a sprig of may bells, and a quote from Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns: "None of this matters at all." The interpretive meaning of each card is expressed on its face with a small excerpt of the game's text. The Minor Arcana are divided into four suits of Harry's Attributes—Motorics, Psyche, Physique, Intellect—and each card in that suit is a quote from a skill under that Attribute. The Major Arcana are assigned quotes from other sources like NPC dialogue or Thought Cabinet problems & solutions. Pips for the Minors are counted with diamonds like the game's skill points; each actor or title is printed with their in-game color, but made shiny & metallic with bronzing powder.
each piece of text was set in handset lead type, assembled from individual pieces for each letter and space, and printed relief on a chandler & price clamshell press. end description.]
🎊🎊 Desert Bus for Hope starts for 2023 on nov. 11th and i have made an item this year for the craftalong that will be up for giveaway between 6am-12pm on Monday the 13th! 🎊🎊 It is a full tarot deck based on Disco Elysium and it has several pieces of my heart & soul in it but NOT my blood because i put a bandaid right on that :) donations for this and any other auctions & giveaways for Desert Bus go to Child's Play Charity.
notes: i did not make a whole new interpretive model for this deck, apologies, that was outside of my scope. it's generally compatible with a Rider-Waite model, with Motorics for Wands, Psyche for Cups, Physique for Swords, and Intellect for Disks. (full distribution of text listed by card, linked below. any spelling or transcription errors you find there, i promise i fixed them in print—that's copied from my digital mockup which was copied hastily from screenshots.)
i also do not track hours on these kinds of projects because that way lies madness, but i will say: i knew how much time it would take to print it. it was a lot but i was not worried about it, i know how to print. i was very worried about how much time it would take to absorb the sheer amount of text, and distribute it across the cards, and really get an array i believe in. i was right to worry, and i have absolutely had a few anxious nightmares about discovering the Perfect excerpt that should've gone in and i missed it, and the suit of Intellect made me want to lay on the floor a few times, but still! i believe there's many versions of a deck you could make from this game and this one is a good one.
i think the Minors fit really well with the double-edged sword of Harry's skills, their advice, their priorities. the circular way the Fool-World assignment works out makes me smile every time. The colors on The Star came out so nice. i think Justice fulfills some of my favorite things about Kim's character & purpose in the story. i worried sometimes that editing to such short clips would lose too much of the politics of the game, but of course you can't really take them out and they're especially present in the Majors—the Devil and the Hierophant, The Star and The Sun. i've wanted to design a tarot deck for years and i love this game deeply and i let this idea percolate for a few months and it never stopped making me laugh so here it is, & given a beautiful purpose :)
i also literally could not have done this without xyrilin's Disco Reader and the FAYDE On-Air Playback Experiment to navigate the dialogue and skill checks. Really couldn’t have tied the whole concept & colophon in its final bow without the Disco Reader :)) thank thank thank, they're so fun to investigate that it was honestly very difficult to focus on my task instead of veering off and exploring every branch in an extremely disorganized way.
actual printing went well honestly, very few problems! i think that means i'm getting pretty good at planning one of these monstrosities, although perhaps it also means i'm not challenging myself enough. hmm. no that's silly there's 78 ding dang cards in this thing. anyway the drop & replace formes worked well, no registration issues. mum convinced me to overprint another half a deck's worth of cards when I was printing backs & borders and of course she was right :/ there were a handful of cards that actually had better line breaks and fewer lines total in true type than in the digital mockup, so i needed all the spares I had to put those new short quotes into the appropriate border breakage. next time i will not question her.
handset in Garamond, Eden Bold, and secret Neuland.
WIP : full text card assignments
bonus photo of the kind of trash notes i always take to plan things like how many borders were printed with space for short excerpts vs long excerpts, and how many of those are majors vs. minors, because they have a slightly different frame at the bottom edge, etc.
[image description: they are truly garbage notes, i tell you. half of it is written at angles to the other half, many numbers in the math problems are not labeled, mistakes are scribbled over. it gets me there but it doesn't look pretty. end description.]
This engraving of Magnolias by English artist Peter Holland (1915-2004), printed from the original block, is from 2020 Vision: Nineteen Wood Engravers, One Collector, and the Artists Who Inspired Them, compiled and introduced by collector Nigel Hamway, edited by English wood engraver Peter Lawrence, and printed in 2020 by Patrick Randle’s Nomad Letterpress at the Whittington Press in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in an edition of 340 copies for the 100th anniversary of the Society of Wood Engravers.
Holland himself never exhibited or sold a wood engraving in his life. He was an architect by profession who worked for the Ministry of Works. He taught himself wood engraving in his spare time, producing over 80 finely executed, closely observed images, mainly of the natural world. He was deeply inspired by his friendships with master engravers John Farleigh and Monica Poole. Holland was also the father of the editor of 2020 Vision Nigel Hamway's oldest friend, and inspired Hamway to begin his collection of wood engravings. Hamway included this print in the book as an homage to his mentor and because it is Holland's own homage to the work of Farleigh and Poole. Peter Holland's son Paul writes:
My father continued to engrave until late in his life and loved going to the shop of T N Lawrence in Bleeding Heart Yard to buy blocks. He was a prolific sketcher and sought inspiration for his engravings from his drawings, as well as the cottage and its beautiful garden where he and his wife Mavis lived for over fifty years.
making something for the innumerable country music superfan butchfemme lesbians out there (also other butch/butch-loving identifying country music superfans) (but you know)
We have officially reached a viewership level that has never been obtained by another museum before! All of us at the Sacramento History Museum are in disbelief.
We would have never thought that our institution, a small nonprofit museum in Sacramento, California, could reach this many views, but we are incredibly thankful for all of those who take the time to watch our videos and for your support.
In this video, Howard letterpress printed a headline announcing “Sacramento History Museum Reaches One Billion Video Views On YouTube” while using our Washington hand press, which was manufactured in 1852!
In 2018, artist and printmaker Roy Scholten set himself the task to design and print fifty birds using LEGO bricks as the printing matter. Early 2024, the last bird print came off the press. The complete series will be on show for the first time in Grafisch Atelier Hilversum from April 14.