Win a pair of tickets to The Wedding Show 2010

Joel and I are super excited to be exhibiting at The Wedding Show 2010 this coming January. This boutique wedding show is put on annually by The Wedding Co. and previous shows have looked amazing, with very high-quality vendors exhibiting their wares. Here are the details:

What: The Wedding Show 2010

Where: The Carlu, 444 Yonge St., 7th floor, Toronto, ON

When: January 15-17th, Friday 5pm-9pm, Saturday 10am- 6pm, Sunday 10am-5pm.

You’ll be excited to know that we’re giving away a complimentary pair of tickets to the Show (value of $20 each).

Be the first to comment on this post and the tickets are yours!

Papillon Press holiday cards

It’s time for the holidays! And so with the holiday season comes the time to send off your holiday cards (please don’t send holiday emails, unless they’re to complement your paper holiday card).  Claudette the Press has been hard at work printing ours this season.

Papillon Press is introducing our first holiday cards. These two designs are originals, illustrated by yours truly (Joel and Chantal), printed in 3-colours on our favourite 100% cotton Crane Lettra. They also come with lovely coordinating light blue envelopes. You can order single cards, a 6-pack of each or an assorted 6-pack (of both cards).

Visit our new Etsy shop to purchase.

One of a Kind Show, Toronto

Chantal and I took in an afternoon checking out the many amazing vendors at the One of a Kind show in Toronto last weekend. The show is huge and there were so many great booths and products for sale. We zigzagged through the aisles from A-Z and spent a good amount of time sampling chocolates, cookies, sauces and many other delicious foods before continuing our shopping.

We thought we would share a few of our favorites from the show, which runs until December 6th.

We came across these great etchings and engravings from Richard Metzger: www.richardmetzger.com

Richard Metzger

Chantal recognized this vendor from having bought from her three years ago at another show. She creates beautiful Victorian and Art Nouveau jewelry: www.circa1890.com

Circa 1890

I ran into a very talented artist and sculptor who I recognized from our days at Sheridan College in the illustration program. I really love Gosia’s sculptures of interesting faces mounted on frames or wall hangings that include hooks for your key chains or jewelry: www.gosia.ca

Gosia's wall hanging sculptures

Chantal and I were wowed by the sculptural landscapes of New York City and Chicago. Created from weathered plywood, the landscapes are built up three dimensionally to create really impressive pieces: www.heatherkocsis.com

Subway platform by Heather Kocsis

There are a lot more great vendors at the One of a Kind show so if you’re in Toronto or passing through be sure to check it out!

Wedding Invitation Set – Meghan and Robert

Our Fox and the Hare design was created in June, for Rob and Meg’s autumn Ottawa wedding. The couple did not have any concrete ideas for their invitations, only a colour scheme of navy blue and silver. We set about creating a few different sketches for them to choose from.

Initial chosen sketch for The Fox and the Hare design. The swans were swapped for foxes.

Rob and Meg chose the sketch of an ornate motif featuring a hare and a swan. Since they felt they did not have much connection to swans, we were asked to change the swans to another woodland animal. It was a perfect opportunity to add a fox and make it a themed invitation set.

Chantal illustrated the final motif with hidden elements; “easter eggs” for people to find if they looked closely enough (can you find them?). We then illustrated the reply card, map and two sets of envelopes with the same theme as the announcement. Finally, everything was printed in silver and navy blue and turned out beautifully, despite an incredibly tight registration job (we love a challenge here at PP!).

We want to thank Rob and Meg for being so open to our ideas and giving us full rein to create an invitation that we love and are very proud of!

Finished invitation, including map and reply card. Carrots and lettuce are hidden throughout the motif; can you see them?

Detail of the announcement. The registration was tough but it turned out well!

Finished invitation set, including reply and outer envelopes, ready for packaging.

The Press Room

We recently had a few students from Cambrian College’s Graphic Design program come by the studio to learn a few things about letterpress for a project they were working on. We were more than happy to show them around the press room, give them a printing demonstration and talk about the press.  Since we bought our letterpress we’ve been happy with how open and generous other printers have been with sharing their experiences and we want to do the same.

While we talked about our press, one of the students, Tennille Heinonen, took some photos of the press and some things around the studio. Here are her photos. We think they turned out great and have a really beautiful look to them, thanks Tennille!

Drawers of type

An old drawer of type

A chase filled with type

Claudette, the press

The tympan with gauge pins in place

Photopolymer plate

An old engraving

A couple drawers of type

Papillon Press in Snap Sudbury

The local newspaper Snap Sudbury came to our studio recently to feature Papillon Press in their November wedding gallery.

Click on the image for a larger view

Costa Rican Letterpress

I never thought I’d be able to associate a country like Costa Rica with letterpress, but here it is: I (Chantal) went to Costa Rica for a week in August. I had one day to spend by myself in the capital, San José, so I decided to visit one of the few museums they have. As an aside, I don’t recommend spending more than a day in San José because it’s one of the worst cities I’ve visited. The rest of the country is beautiful, but San José is a dump.

As I was saying, I’d just paid the admission to the Museo del Oro (Gold Museum) and as I’m walking in, just sitting there in the foyer is a Heidelberg! My day had not been especially good up until then so this sight heartened me. Plus, I’d never seen a Heidelberg up close before.

Turns out the Costa Rican currency museum was also in the same building and the Heidelberg was used to print currency as late as the 1990s! It was regularly used until 1994 and then was used to print bills on special occasions. The last time it was used was in 2000. They even had the engraved plates that were used to print the different colours on the bills.

How awesome would it be to have special letterpressed currency?!

Here’s a photo I took of the Heidelberg; it’s not the best quality, but the light was very dim in the foyer.

Our first print

Our first ever print on our letterpress was made after we reassembled the press a couple weeks after the big move.

When we bought the press it came with a bunch of blocks of type that were just sitting in the galleys, tied with string. These blocks of type were arranged for wedding invitations, business cards and coupons, among many other things (like hotel check in times), and just sat in the galleys.  The type is usually sorted and returned to the typecases after printing but this stuff never was, and hasn’t been put away in over 30 years.

Blocks of text arranged in a galley

We decided to take one of these blocks and lock it up in the chase to print a test print.  We ended up choosing at random (it became too hard to choose from all the good ones) this $1 coupon for the Knights of Columbus with a nice border.

Our first print, a Knights of Columbus coupon

It’s a bit spotty and definitely not the greatest print for our first ever on the press, but we were just happy to see that the press was working smoothly after we reassembled it.

Hopefully we’ll get the chance to print more of those 30-year old blocks of text, even if the coupons have all expired.

Illustrated Promotional Cards

In addition to being letterpress printers here at Papillon Press, we also do illustration work for editorial clients. I (Joel)  just sent out a batch of new promotional postcards and decided to include a letterpressed card of my drawing of the Sudbury water tower. I drew this piece a few months ago (you can read about it here) and thought it would look great printed with the press, as so many things do.

Photopolymer plate of the Sudbury water tower

The first step was to scan the drawing at about 1200 dpi and clean up the lines a bit. I then sent the drawing off to Boxcar Press for them to create the photopolymer plate needed to make the print on the press. The amount of detail in the plate is really amazing. The small cross-hatched lines are almost invisible on the plate unless you tilt it into the proper light.

Blind printing

I made a print without any ink (called blind printing) and it gives a really nice appearance. Once I had the press set up with ink, the gauge pins set and the paper registered, (some pure black mixed with a bit of red) I was ready to start printing.

Painting the sky with watercolor

I printed 200 cards but about 7 of them were over-inked or fell under the press into the oily puddles below (a lot of oil is required to keep Claudette, our press, running smoothly). With those cards lost I ended up with a limited edition of 193 cards. I signed and numbered them all, but the most time-consuming part of all was laying down watercolor washes on each card to give them a colorful sky to contrast with the black ink. Here’s a shot (above) of a bunch of them laying out to dry. 193 of these things, that took a while.

Colorful edges on Crane Lettra paper

I really put down a lot of water on these cards and the colors bled over the tops to give an appearance of edge painting. I used Crane Lettra 110 lb paper for this project and they turned out great, even though it’s not the best paper for watercolor painting. I’m looking forward to doing more promo cards on the letterpress.

If you’re an illustrator or designer and want your promotional postcards printed on a letterpress, we can do that for you. Contact Papillon Press for more information to give your promo cards a really unique appearance and feel that art directors will want to hold on to.

From the Inspiration file – The Golden Book

Joel and I are huge fans of vintage book and magazine design, specifically from the turn of the century or the early twentieth century. That time period was considered a golden age for illustrators and you could make a very nice living doing it back then (unlike now). At the turn of the century, N.C Wyeth made the same amount per book cover as illustrators do now! But before I digress into one of my favourite rants, let me talk about the main reason for this post.

I came across these covers for The Golden Book, a 1920s & 30s magazine that published short fiction, through a Livejournal community. There is precious little information about this publication on the web, except that it ran short stories that were mostly reprints from classic stories (H.G Wells, Victor Hugo, etc.).

But the covers! I love the covers. The core of the cover design remains the same (the golden circle and the title) but every cover artist found a different way of dressing up the core elements. The colours and illustrations are really beautiful.

Here is a selection of my favourites, and for a more comprehensive archive, visit the Galactic Central website.