Wedding invitations need not be all typographic. This is a nice change in pace from most invites that tend to focus more on type than image. And we love letterpress printing lots of color, so this artwork does the trick. It was designed by Sheraton Green over at CSA Design.  The peacock image comes from the CSA Image collection – an easy $40 bucks to license for wedding invites.

Since CSA also designs all the French Paper stuff, they sent over 140lb Cover Poptone Sweet Tooth paper stock. We printed four PMS colors, with some really beautiful overprinting happening inside  the illustration. These kind of solid areas are always a challenge for letterpress. Note how the solid areas are a bit “salty” in the ink coverage.

Atmosphere is heading out for their When God Gives You Ugly tour. We just finished a special edition letterpress poster designed by Keith Wiliams. It features a “1950′s Diner Vampire Fight Scene” watercolor painting by Minneapolis native Michael Gaughan. (If you check out Michael’s website, be sure and see the collection of guitar sculptures. But don’t look to long or you might find the Fart Tube Air Matress) Posters will be available from Atmosphere while they tour and also for sale on the Rhymesayers site after the tour, if there are any left. So get out there and support these guys.

From a technical standpoint, this poster was a real challenge to plate and letterpress print. We took the original CMYK image of the watercolor painting and converted it in Photoshop to a tri-tone image with Blue, Red and Black spot colors. The image is built with a 90 line halftone screens. We push the values in the image to land mostly between 20 and 80 percent. More than 80% starts can start to fill with ink, and less than 20% may risk washing away in the plating process. Halftone images can be a challenge to ink up on letterpress and require a robust inking system. We threw down a massive amount of ink on our Heidelberg Cylinder. This was printed at our maximum 18 x 23 sheet size on French Paper Poptone 65lbC. This perfectly ugly edition is about 1000 posters.