Letterpress & Giclée marry once again for the creation of these wonderful posters designed by the amazing TheHouseThatLarsBuilt! We have worked with Brittany from TheHouseThatLarsBuilt before on her beautiful wedding invitations, so we were excited to work with her on another project.
Brittany had designed the image of the Royal Wedding Processional Map for a tote bag originally and, after several requests for a print of the image, she contacted us to print the posters. Letterpress printing all of the colors was out of the question, so we decided to combine the craft of letterpress with the fine art reproduction capabilities of giclée once again.
Registering letterpress to giclée can be quite a challenge. Each 23×35 sheet of Crane Lettra had to be hand fed into the giclée printer very carefully to ensure consistent printing of the image so we wouldn’t be angry at ourselves when trying to register the photopolymer letterpress plates to the giclée image. After the paper is through in the giclée printer, we cut down the parent sheets to fit into our vintage Vandercook SP-15 letterpress. After adjusting the registration, packing, and amont of ink on the press, everything was just right and we started the process of hand printing the posters one at a time. Once we are to this point there is little adjustment and ,other than adjusting the ink, it is only a matter of printing through the pieces. So that is what we did.
The design of the posters was great for creating a deep impression in the paper, so we printed these with lots of packing to really make the impression of the letterpress pop from the poster and work well with the rich colors of the giclée. For a bit of Brittany’s story of creating these beautiful pieces, head over to her blog post on the process and enter for a chance to win one of the posters!
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