OneCanoeTwo

Heavy Equipment: We print all of our artwork on two big hunks of iron: a 10×15 Chandler & Price letterpress named Roy, and his big brother, a 12×18 Chandler & Price named Charlie.  We also have a guillotine paper cutter named Cuttina.

We do the heavy lifting, or printing, in a big red barn in the middle of a corn field, in the middle of Missouri, in middle America. We’re lucky to be surrounded by handy farmers who know how to fix all the little things that come up when you print on 100 year old, obsolete equipment, and they keep us on top of safety and routine maintenance. “Now girls, you need to oil this just like a combine. It might take two hours, but you gotta do it.”

Art is Hard: From sketchbook to printed piece. This all started because we love to draw, doodle, and generally do art. Sometimes we have a plan (“let’s make Christmas cards”) and sometimes we just scan in some random drawing that Carrie did during a faculty meeting at school while her boss looked over her shoulder.

Part of what makes our letterpress artwork cool is that we really love that hand-drawn look. And it really is hand-drawn. We erase the pencil lines on the computer, but otherwise, it’s pretty much straight from sketchbook to polymer plate.

We get these big new-fangled “stamps” made that go into our old-school presses, and then we print the daylights out of them.

Sometimes Carrie likes to cut things, so she carves designs into linoleum blocks which we print on the big presses.

Things get really exciting at ye olde craft barn when we print multiple colors. We have to perfectly align every plate, not to mention have a good plan about what colors we want to use ahead of time. We spend a lot of time mixing our inks from just eight or so pots of colors. This is fun, but not scientific.  Beth’s favorite color is Pantone 314U (it’s a limey green). Carrie’s favorite color is Robin’s Egg Blue from the Crayola Crayon set of 64.