Experiments and a New Jon Smith Print

If you haven’t noticed, Dennis has been holding down the fort around here. That’s because I’m working on a complete redesign of the blog. Have you missed me?? I really missed posting! I asked Dennis if I could have a turn today so I could update you.

I had planned to spend my whole break on the site, but something unexpected happened. Our “First Snow” print sold out at City Bird and they asked us for more!! After Dennis picked me up, spun me around and took me to Howell’s for a pitcher of beer, we got right to work on finishing up the next one. We wanted to print this one on old sheet music that we hand stained with tea and an ink wash. Each song had a name on top (“Confidence”, “Lost Happiness”, etc.) and we were in love with the idea of using it. Here’s what the inside cover looked like:

As it turns out, wavy, water damaged paper doesn’t screen print well. At least, not large blocks of color. The valleys in each wave were not picking up the ink in the screen. So after we had hand stained each piece of paper and I’d spent hours meticulously trimming 1/4″ off of each side, we had to admit that it was a failed experiment. Water and screen printing are not friends. Or so we thought.

Last night after taking out my frustration by killing my husband over and over in Mortal Kombat (sounds worse in print), I found this:

“Blotter Color” is a 4-color print by Jon Smith. Before printing the last color, the black line work, he splattered watercolors on each one. Each print is listed individually in his Big Cartel shop. He talks more about his experiment on his blog, including a video that shows the differences between each print.

Why did his experiment work but not ours? A few reasons, maybe. He used thick watercolor paper while our sheet music was really thin. And, he only printed line work on the watercolored paper where we were printing large blocks of color. Plus, we really waterlogged our paper all the way to the edges, and it looks like his edges aren’t wavy at all. Or maybe he knows some crazy witchery.

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