I received the Epic combo kit from Lifestyle Crafts for my birthday and I thought it’d be a cool AIDS LifeCycle fundraising idea to create some custom plates based on my photography. Designing and creating the artwork took much longer than expected, but I ended up choosing to create something based on this photo that I took from a ride last month:
I decided to create a 2-color print. I did the color separations in Photoshop and then used Illustrator to create some cross-hatching patterns to give the image a more interesting texture. It took a long freaking time (I used Illustrator’s live trace. This was nice, but created a bunch of paths and points. When I compounded that with the cross hatching swaths, there were even more paths and points. This made it hard and slow to edit.)
Here’s a preview of what I expected things to look like:
I ordered plates through boxcar press and received them this past week.
The above photo is of one of the plates from Boxcar press. It’s a flexy plastic material with a bit of hardness to it. This one is partially inked with the yellow/orange speedball block printing ink that I had purchased. I was surprised at the resolution that the plates could handle.
above: Brayer, with ink.
I tried varying amounts of ink to see what would look better on paper:
above: blue ink for the second plate
above: This is what it looks like when you run a plate through the press. It’s basically some rollers that apply a lot of pressure to the paper and the plate.
above: an unevenly inked blue but still pretty cool
I didn’t have enough time to play around too much, but here are some of the prototype cards:
I think I’ll make sure there’s more ink coverage for the next set.
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