This year we have been printing away, I have been keeping busy in the studio running some new editions as well as reprinting some older pieces. I am sharing some process pics of tome of the print I have been working on and talk a little bit about the process that goes into producing a print edition.
This is after printing the first two colors, the orange for the background and the grey for the jacket and tie on Melanie’s Malcolm X print. The film for the final color is placed on top to check how the trapping is coming along and to prepare for the next color.
This is the stack of prints once the third color was printed, the green was pretty hard to get right because it had to match up on the top, left and right sides. If that wasn’t hard enough i also had to match on the X in the background pattern so it looks right once the red X’s print it looks good.
This is the table I print on, you can see the way the screen is locked in and stays up with the help of a counter balance on the back of the table. This helps a lot during printing process to keep good registration as long I place the paper in the registration tabs correctly every time.
This is the print drying on the racks once the flesh was printed, this is the fourth color color down and two more to go.
This is the print once the red and the black were printed. I try to keep the registration as tight as possible and make sure everything comes out nice and aligned, this is a lot of work and in the end I am super happy when everything looks spot on.
This is the beginning of a new print, mixing colors for Melanie’s Day of the Dead Print. This is the orange that will go down second. I used some fluorescent orange powder to get the color nice and bright.
Left: The first color to go down is a blend, orange to yellow to orange. On this pull I ended up printing with out a sheet of paper down, it sucks when this happens because i have to rush to clean the table so the ink doesn’t dry in on the screen. Right: The second on top of the blend to give a cool effect on the circular design, almost like a sub burst coming out from behind the danzante.
Left: This blue green was the third color to go down, the registration on this color was crucial to get the last color to go down in the right place. Right: The last color down, I was super happy with the way this print came out. The registration was right on, which was pretty hard because the outline of the danzante is just a hair bigger than the blue-green background color.
This is my Idle No More poster, I designed this using photos taken by Michelle Gutiérrez at an Idle No More event in Oakland. This is the first color drying on the racks with the film for the second color laying on top preparing to register the second color.
This is the stack of posters with the second color down, I printed 225 posters to give away at the Idle No More in Sacramento in January and the Big Time/Idle No More in San Francisco.
This is a reprint of a print I made back in 2001, the quote on the poster is from a Cafe Tacuba song about the Zapatistas. When I printed these I made about 15-20 prints so it is great to have some more of these to put out into the world.
This is another reprint, the first time around I had so many issue and lost so many prints with smudges and errors so I wanted to make so more because people have really loved these posters.