I try to be offended by the number of spam comments that get left on my blog, but they are all so complimentary that it’s hard!

So after playing around with my plate scrap I ordered my own starter boxcar plate. I wanted to experiment with quilting, so I made some little 1.5″ samples, and I made another pattern, a little bird to print, my little mustachio’d egg guy, and a snowman guy.

So the plate arrived today, and I decided to brave the 105F temps in the garage/studio (ha ha I call it a studio to make myself feel better, but it’s a super super hot garage) to play with it. This was also my first chance to use the new trucks and see how she’s inking. I even mixed up my first custom color!

It looks like I’m finally getting an even coating of ink. Unfortunately I’m not getting an even imprint, which could be caused by my packing or the press may not just be able to produce enough pressure for such a big area.

It was really too hot to experiment further, and I need more packing material – I ordered it last week but it didn’t come this week. I may start trying to press at night, but that comes with a whole different set of problems, light, bugs, and it’s still hot.

more pics:

I’ve been thinking about going back to school for a few years now. I’ve made a couple of false starts and I still can’t fully commit to a major, but I have fully committed to more education.

I have pretty much always considered myself an artist. I was involved in art all through high school, but was convinced by my family that majoring in art at university would be a mistake. I’ve continued taking art classes for fun, and I’ve experimented in most forms of art & craft, including most recently dabbling in printmaking. I love taking the continuing education art classes offered through the local museum of modern art.

What I like most is doing illustration and graphic design (and some web design). Graphic design is often not really considered art, and a lot of times it can just be clip art arranged in thoughtful ways with random ink splatter photoshop brushes applied and called art. What I am interested in is kind of a combination of fine art and graphic design.

I have taught myself a lot about graphic design in the last couple of years, but I am at a point where I now where I recognise that I have a lot left to learn and not really sure where to go from here. I’m the kind of learner where, when I hit a wall, I just keep hitting the wall until I finally break through it. I have a lot of cheats and work arounds that I use because I don’t know the “right” way to use a program. While these things work, I also know they are not the best or more efficient use of my time or the program. Learning to use them properly is only going to increase the number of things I can do.

Trying to decide between getting an Associates of Applied Science in graphic design or a BFA/BA is difficult. Most people do not realise that I never finished my BA. While I don’t really feel that this has held me back much in life, I still sometimes wish that I had my BA. However, the transfer BFA/BA program at Austin Community College only has four art classes over four semesters, the rest are all core courses. I still need most of my core courses because I chose, perhaps foolishly, to focus on my major courses before I dropped out. I could probably squeeze in a couple of extra art classes, but I would mostly be doing core coursework, and I am at a point where I would prefer to focus on design.

(this is not to imply in anyway that core coursework isn’t necessary and I will be completing some even if I get an AAS, just that it is not as core-intensive)

Also, the university I would likely transfer to is Texas State, which is about an hour and a half away, which would be a really bad daily commute and I’m not sure I would even want to do it. There is always UT but I doubt I would be able to get in (it’s very competitive) or Concordia (religiousity), but they are also much more expensive.

With the AAS, I would be taking four design classes a semester, which I love the idea of. On the other hand, with the AAS, if I decide to get a BA in graphic design, none of the program courses are transferable. There may be exceptions (it’s up to the school) but they are considered to be tech/vocational courses and are not applied to the BA coursework.

Still, I have opted to enter the AAS program. I’m committing to two or three semesters, at which point I can re-think switching to the BFA/BA. After about five hours of standing in lines on campus, I have finally gotten everything all straightened out. That’s a completely different blog entry about the insane and impractical administrative policies that I think all community colleges love to implement. I registered for my courses today – Basic Illustration, Basic Graphic Design, Digital Publishing and Digital Imaging. Of these I’m most looking forward to Illustration and Publishing.

I feel very excited and I am so lucky to have such an awesome husband supporting me. When I told him I was thinking about going back to school, he didn’t hesitate to tell me that he thought it was a great idea. I am not sure how much I will talk about it, but I will probably post my coursework and projects on flickr if anyone is interested.

If you watched my video I posted a few entries ago, you may have noticed that the left side of my plate wasn’t being inked. After some troubleshooting I discovered the issue was my morgan expansion trucks. But what does that even MEAN?

Think of the truck as a wheel that sits at the end of the roller. The truck guides the roller down the rails and over the plate. Imagine if the right side of you car had 2 flat tires, while the left side were fully inflated. This is what happened with my trucks. The right side trucks were flatter, so the rollers came closer to the plate.

You see those two, perfect little circles of rubber? That is the replacement rubber. Do you see those swollen, cracked tires? Those are the cause of some of the previous woes.

Compare and be amazed!

It was really just by luck I was able to get the plate inked at all. I’ve taken apart the trucks and cleaned about 30 years of grime off them and will be reassembling them soon. I have enough of the replacement rubber to last 2 sets of trucks (2 trucks per roller, and 3 rollers, so 6 trucks). From my quick test it seems like the trucks were the main issue, although I already know I need to replace at least one of my rollers as well.

I also received six tubes of ink, including, disappointingly, a tube of red which matches my already-owned giant can of red. So expect to see a lot of red ink used on the testing and promotional stuff.

As you may or may not know, I am a bit of a perennial fantasist. I have a fantasy of moving to Sonoma – Healdsburg, particularly, but probably only because I have visited it, I think any of those little towns in the middle of wine country would do, really. We could live in a restored Victorian and I would have a cute little shop with hardwoods and big windows and I would sell paper and weird little toys from Japan, and $40 tubes of hand cream, and in the back I could have a little letterpress studio and maybe I could teach or something. I have versions of this fantasy for Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Madison, and even sometimes Austin.

(Obviously I am quite far off from being able to teach letterpress but I would like to, maybe, at some point, because it’s so hard to find some place to learn)

ANYWAY, around December, a girl I know (she would be a frenemy if we were friends, or she knew I existed, but she doesn’t, so we’ll just think of her as a girl who has a blog that I read, but I don’t really like her, and don’t pretend that you don’t do the same thing) talked about buying a vacation home in Healdsburg. Instantly jealous, I read on, and she revealed that it was much less expensive than she had first supposed.

So, curious, I decided to look up the MLS in Healdsburg and see what was what. Is this an achievable dream? I’m going to come into some money once Phil kicks it, and I would like to plan my spending in advance. However, I soon discovered that every realtor had apparently made some kind of secret hide-the-listings pact, and I couldn’t view anything without signing up with one of them, so I kind of just picked one at random and joined, browsed the listings (well out of our price range, but with a lot of life insurance and a cheap hitman, maybe doable).

Every day for the next two weeks I got email from this realtor. I thought it was some kind of spam/mailing list from them, but I eventually realised that the realtor was emailing me every day. I wrote him back and said, thanks but no thanks, not going to move in the next year. The emails slowed down, but still came about once a week, and finally I got the threatening notice that my account was going to be deleted if I didn’t respond. I don’t care if my account is deleted, so I just ignored it. I haven’t been on the site since I registered six months ago.

Since then the emails have taken a kind of passive aggressive turn, the most recent being, “I ASSUME YOU WANT YOUR ACCOUNT DELETED??” and I imagine the body something like, “I THOUGHT WE HAD A GOOD THING BUT I GUESS YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ME ANYMORE? WHAT ABOUT THE GOOD TIMES? I HAVE A 900 SQ FT COTTAGE TWO BLOCKS FROM TOWN CENTER PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME!”

So, open letter, if you’re going to make people register to use your site, don’t harass them after they’ve already told you that they’re not interested. Save your weird guilt trips and passive aggressive notes for your spouse, and don’t be surprised that 90% of the people that sign up don’t become customers. The internet is full of looky loos who will jump through your stupid hoops to get information, but have no interest in purchasing. In fact, forcing people to sign up is a waste of your time if you plan on personally handling each such “lead”. Instead you should have the option for people to sign up AFTER viewing, because at least those people are genuinely interested in what you have.

My love affair with letterpress started about two and a half years ago, when I was looking for wedding invitations. I fell in love with the textured look of the pressed invitations. I wondered how I could get into letterpressing, so I started looking around. One of the first things I found was on youtube – I found it very overwhelming. The idea of having to smelt my own lead to make type? Yeah, ok.

About six months later I stumbled onto some more modern letterpress sites, and eventually made my way (as all newbies do) to briarpress.org. This is where I learned there are basically 2 letterpress camps now – the traditional printers with lead type, but also this relatively new technology involving plates created using digital artwork. This is not to say that the long time printers don’t use plates, or that new printers don’t use lead, rather, just that there is a life outside of lead.

After discovering that one of these cast iron beasts could (in theory) be readily purchased for a minimal investment (ok, stop laughing!) I set about to figure out what kind of press I should get. At first I really wanted one of the Kelsey tabletop presses, or a Chandler & Price Pilot, or (if I was dreaming big) a Golding Pearl. I knew what I wanted to use it for – cards, art prints, wedding invitations, and the like, and I knew a Kelsey probably wasn’t going to do it for me. They take up the least about of room, but have a very small printing area (about 2×3 safely). I thought about getting a bigger press, like a C&P old/new style, but it didn’t really seem feasible because of the space they take up.

Anyway, I decided to keep my eyes open for a local press. I would have taken a Kelsey if I could have found one, at least to play with it, but I was hoping for a C&P Pilot or a Pearl. I posted to Craigslist and the local section of the briarpress classifieds, the only response I ever got was for a C&P 10×15 for about $2k three hours away. I still kind of almost wish I had bought that press, but I’m pretty happy with what I ended up with.

After about a year, I eventually gave up on finding anything in Texas, presses seem to be pretty rare south of the Mason-Dixon. Apparently if I lived in Illinois still, I could pretty much walk into any old building and find eight or nine abandoned machines. All of the presses that I have seen/heard about in the south have been shipped in from the north east or the mid west. They were commonly used in schools up there, but I guess that they never made it down here.

On ebay, the smaller the press, the more expensive. A good Kelsey will go for nearly a thousand dollars sometimes! I never found a pilot or a pearl on ebay, but I set my eyes a little bigger and decided to take the seemingly insane plunge and by a C&P 8×12 press. A couple of months later I found one in KS that seemed in good shape, it had been used in a shop until “recently”, had all of it’s parts, and ran – which is just about all you can ask for. And so, I put down my $350 bid, and she was mine. I converted half of the garage into a studio space – which isn’t really super great in the 105F Texas summers, but it’s fine for now.

Of course, the issue of getting her home – Thanks to freightquote.com for the cross country shipping. Shipping from Kansas City to Austin ended up being about $700, or roughly double the cost of the press. I cleaned most of the grime off her and found all of her hidden oil holes. Then I hooked up the terrifying motor, and she ran! And then I let her languish in my garage for the next nine months until I was able to face the fine tuning required to actually get her printing.

The fact that she runs doesn’t mean that she prints, and the parts and supplies needed to make her a printing machine felt overwhelming. I started buying the supplies slowly, starting with my boxcar base, ink, paper, furniture, quoins, and of course, you can’t use a quoin without a quoin key. Many of the supplies needed aren’t available new anymore, so there were a couple of months bidding on ebay or trying to track down someone who actually sells the parts.

But the truth is that I am so afraid of making a mistake and ruining the press, that’s why I haven’t made more of an effort previously. I even thought about selling her to someone who would actually use her. But, over the last six weeks, I collected the parts that I need. If you are into letterpress, you know that you never stopping needing parts, but I have enough to slap some ink on the disk and see what happens, and how much more work is needed.

My first run was disappointing, but I was able to achieve some impression. After I adjusted my packing, I started getting great results:

Here you can see the great impression I’m getting from the plate. I’m using the Crane Lettra paper (it’s the most popular paper in use with letterpresses, I believe) so I get a good imprint.

I only have a tiny sample plate that I got free from the folks over at boxcar, so I tested the imprint and inking by moving it around the base. On the left side, I started having ink issues.

I had no idea what could cause this so I started doing some research. I figured it was either my rollers (that directly ink the plate) or the trucks, which are basically little wheels that sit at the end of the rollers and guide them down the rails. After inspecting my trucks, I realised that they weren’t the same size – some were bigger, some were flatter, so no wonder I was only getting ink on one side! The next day I tried printing again, using the 4 rollers that were in the best condition and the same size, and this time I got no ink at all on the plate. I added back the third roller and the mismatch wheels, trying to confirm my theory, but still no ink.

After more research, I discovered that my trucks were Morgan Expansion rollers, and could be made to contract or expand, which explained the different sizes. The rubber on most of mine is too old to do much in the way of adjustment, but I got 2 of them pretty tight (smaller so that the rollers would be closer to the plate so it could pick up ink).

Today I went to a local paper and graphics store (xpedx) as they sell inks, and they directed me to a print repair shop around the corner, where I picked up blue, red, yellow, and white. I already had black (obviously, as that is what I had been using). When I came home I put on my one roller with the flat trucks, a dab of red ink, and a fresh sheet of paper.

I moved the plate scrap around to make sure I was getting ink in every position, and I do seem to be! The print is quite sloppy, with only one roller the ink wasn’t as well spread as it normally would be, and I may have had too much ink on in general. The trucks are also a bit too low I think, and my rollers probably need to be recovered. I found a place that sells the replacement rubber for the trucks.

My next step is to have some plates made to really see how she prints. I’m so excited to really be finally digging in, I’m still afraid of not doing a 100% awesome job but am also aware that it takes years to really be a master so I’m trying to be a little easier on myself and not let my fears take over.

While in general I find the whole “Create something beautiful every day” crowd to be a bit schtick-y for me, with their artful photos of old banana peels and jam jars and their bokeh style photographs focusing on the beauty (in the ugliness) of the constantly decaying urban landscape, I like the concept of working on something creative every day. Not really every day, because I think that’s too much pressure for me, but I at least try to think of things that I want to create in the near future.

Anyway, the last few days have been about getting my letterpress running:

You can see that the motor isn’t hooked up. I am a little terrified of the press. I am completely terrified of the motor. Running the press with the motor is enough to send me into a fear coma. Once I get it working reliably by hand I’m going to figure out how to adjust the speed of the motor down from “terrifying” to “really scared”, and then I can begin practicing the dance which inevitably ends in my having my hand smashed by the platen. But, you know. Who even uses hands anymore.

Anyway so I bought this awesome letterpress I’m restoring, and one of the main things I want it for is just crazy art prints. My first project is Little Red Riding Hood, and I’ve done a couple of sketches today, the latest being:

This is a little more adult than what I am going for, but I like it. Last fall I took a class on digital paining using the wacom tablet – previously I had owned a tablet for about five years, it acted mostly as a really terrible coaster. I have been drawing with a mouse for about eight years and making the switch to the tablet was so hard, but every day in class I forced myself to use the pen, even if the results were terrible.

The reason for my desire to use the pen is that some where in my learning to draw with a mouse, I forgot how to draw using pen and paper. While drawing on a computer is never going to be the same as drawing or painting on paper, the practice probably can’t hurt.

Anyway I haven’t drawn for a few months and I started again this week, using the mouse. I became so frustrated! I just couldn’t get things to work the way I wanted. I grabbed my wacom, and now it is second nature. So I’m no longer a mouse drawer, I guess! Although I will probably still draw mice, if needed. It’s so funny that I really had to force myself to use the tablet for three hours a week, and now I love it.

Don’t think I am like some kind of bullshit douchebag who is going to post all about my dreams and then we try to interpret them. This was a fucking amazing movie dream that I am going to sell to Brad Pitt so NO ONE STEAL MY DREAM!

Ok it starts off with a movie dream within a dream – a pretty version of myself has this dream. It is a movie staring Harrison Ford as an angry old police detective who has to save his family. This could also be played by Clint Eastwood. He is tracking down a murdering psycho, but the guy keeps getting into his house and attacking his family. So the movie like BLOWS UP at the end with this huge confrontation – this is where we realise that Harrison Ford’s family has been dead for twenty years and so is the killer! The killer is still stalking them from beyond the grave! But how do you kill a ghost? Harrison Ford has to cross to the other side to SAVE HIS FAMILY!

Ok that movie is inside this fun CAPER movie! That starts off with the prettier me and my best friend going to LA to have our ghost movie made, but no one will give us the time of day because we are no bodies! We hook up with a couple of loser dudes, like a nerd and someone who plays guitar. We run all over town finding people who work in Hollywood and trying to get them to take on our movie. We find this big name guy and we are telling him about the movie but he is not interested until I mention the LESBIAN SCENE! Then he is sold! He joins our group and we continue riding around town in little mini Coopers! We stop at Hardees for some food!

Can you even imagine how amazing this movie is going to be?? I’m so excited, I can’t wait to talk to BRAD PITT about playing the horny director! This is going to be AWESOME!

Ok, I have a twitter, and I made a real attempt to put a link on the sidebar, but my wordpress is about 300 years out of date (HYPERBOLE! IT IS THE BASIS FOR ALL MY HUMORS) and I can’t save the file, and I am apparently too stupid to be able to figure out how to upgrade. I just.. I pushed the button. It didn’t work.

So here is my TWITTER:

MY TWITTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PS I really like those pants on you!