Author: Brendan English

I’ve never been super into girly things. Well… I say never… when I was very young I did have quite the penchant for pink and princesses and would later develop a unhealthy obsession over the late ’90s boy band sensation, N’Sync. But most of the things in my life that have shaped my aesthetic have been natural and ancient things. A significant part of my childhood was spent on fields belonging to farmers that my dad had made friends with, looking for arrowheads or geodes. He would send me out of the car on runs to pick a pretty flower or retrieve butterflies that had been hit by a car so he could preserve them. My business cards were inspired by these things, and vintage cologne labels and merit badges. With this card I’m expressing my inner boy scout.

The yellow will be gold ink that I just ordered. BE PREPARED to see only gold cards from me from here on out.

Alex and I have a love of Yahtzee that dates back to the infancy of our relationship. Many of our evenings over the last 5 years have involved Yahtzee and Carlo Rossi, and finally we collaborated on a set to make it a beautiful and functional piece in our home. The lid of the jar has a foot on it, so that it can be flipped over and used as a bowl to roll the dice into. The bottom half of the jar houses the scorecards, dice, and dice shaker. We made a couple of prototypes last year, but  now the jars are taking on a different look, and I will be letterpressing the scorecards. Here is the old version:

Alex throwing:

The first new batch:

Slightly redesigned scorecard I am working on. I would love some feedback before I have a plate made, particualarly on the Yahtzee category. Right now it is 5 thumbs up for 5 of a kind, but I think we can do better than that while still fitting with the vibe of the scorecards. Any ideas? If you click on the picture you should be able to zoom in to see details.

I will be sure to share the final product after the pots are fired and the scorecards are pressed. We will be selling them in my Etsy store when they are finished.

I want to give a big shout out to Grace and Tristan at A Mystery In Common for tweeting about and stirring up some business for Mink Letterpress.  They are doing some awesome things with silkscreening, and are getting ready to open their studio and store in Charlottesville, VA. Their business is a huge role model for me, and I hope someday this can be true:  A Mystery In Common: Screenprinting:: Mink Letterpress: Letterpress. (and my apologies if I just gave you flashbacks of taking the SATs).

Anyway, they spread the word, and Cary from ByCary contacted me about printing business cards for her craft business. She provided me with the design and plates for her super cute cards, and I printed them up. I love the color combination and the smart, simple logo of the birds, illustrating her “Unique Goods” tagline. Check out her Etsy site! Here are some photos of the process… The first run: And the second run: The rejects… (I recycle): Every time I print something I get to know my press better, learn how to communicate with it and am starting to be able to anticipate its moves and tricks. It is also sometimes impossible to read, moody and curmudgeonly. We are still getting used to each other’s idiosyncracies but, as with all new relationships, if you love each other and you are able to learn from your struggles, you can grow.

Now comes a new chapter in this blog… I’m not only going to be sharing the things I’ve been doing, I’m going to try to sell things to you (you: my three followers, or you: the entire world, depending on how you look at it).

I’ve posted my first cards in my new Etsy store. They are available in singles, or in packs of five. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfectly printed, but you want to be a part of my printing history, right? I did a very small run of these cards, so a limited quantity is available. Better hurry!

My nest cards are also available on Etsy in singles and packs of six. Please contact me if you are interested in larger sets.

I posted one of each last night just to get the shop set up, and they both sold within the hour! And the buyer wasn’t even my mom, but a stranger in Maine. I’m pretty psyched about getting these into hands and mailboxes across the country.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/MinkLetterpress?ref=top_trail

When couples have their first wedding anniversary, the traditional gift to give one another is one of paper. It has now been a year since Alex and I got married. He gave me a leather bound book, each page with a year-defining photo and beautiful little written summary of each year we have spent together, and he vows to continue adding to it each year.  Of course, I cried. It was so sweet and special.

I made him these portraits of our little family. I printed each color on a different layer of velum, and when I layered them together, they appeared very faint, and kind of ghostly. I wanted to maintain that feeling to some degree, but I decided cut shapes out in various spots to expose more of the colors from the layers underneath. Then I sewed them together and mounted them in these deep frames, pinned to the mat with gold eyed needles from Alex’s grandma’s sewing kit. I made them separate to leave our family room to grow, maybe someday there will be a couple more frames on the wall.

Bet, my sweet and awesome mother-in-law, (how many people can say that and mean it?) has a house that’s full of beautiful things, like old books and quilts, collages of family photos, Alex’s pottery, and approximately a million nests. This little nest is on her new screened-in back porch, and I drew it while enjoying her porch and a cup of tea.

The trucks that came with my press were old and worn down, and one of them didn’t fit on my rollers for some reason, so I bought some new ones. I tested the nest print with just the two rollers, which did not provide the level of saturation I wanted. Also because the trucks were worn down, the rollers were hitting the plate harder than they should have, making the lines blobby. I went back and worked on it again today with three rollers and was able to get much closer to the result I’m going for.

Before: Two rollers, old trucks

After: Three rollers, new trucks

Difference in saturation and line definition before and after.

I still feel like it has a ways to go, but I’m encouraged to see that with a little patience and experimentation, the press will do what it was designed to do – even after 100 years of hard work. I’ll post the final product as soon as I’m done with it.

I spent all weekend making this:

A semi ovular blue blot of ink, sort of centered on a piece of paper (though, I must say, the paper is gorgeous. Oatmeal Speckletone from French Paper with tiny hairs and wood chips in it). Sweat, and a little bit of blood, have gone into this meaningless smudge. A nest will be printed over it, and the moment the nest plate kisses the paper, it will transform from nothing into something. A blob into an egg. It feels like working in reverse. It would have been much more natural to print the egg over the nest, but because of the black spots on the egg are a part of the nest plate I had to do it this way.

In a past life (college) I was an oil painter, and I had a never ending palette of colors to choose from. There were so many points in the process that I could change my mind or decide to emphasize one thing over another. Painters are allowed to be wishy washy, to change their minds halfway though an idea, and to leave visible evidence that hours, weeks, even months went into one piece. With letterpress, I think it has to look effortless to look great. I’m finding that I like feeling confined to a limited palette, I like having to brainstorm my way through a problem rather than just feel my way through it, and most of all, I like MULTIPLES. How novel. How refreshing.

Since finishing college, the idea of investing so much time into a painting that only a handful of people will see has been exhausting. Having multiple products come out of one idea and one effort feels like a huge turn away from the part of the art world that I never wanted to be involved in. I can send a card to everyone I know, and they can send one to everyone they know. And they’re not copies, each one is an original. Original art that doesn’t hang in a gallery, that can be scribbled on and handled by anyone who encounters it? That’s my kind of art.

Cool letterpress video on an awesome stationery artist’s blog