Blog-only framed print sale

We've been doing some spring cleaning and recently came across the remnants of our 2006 gallery tour, "A Curious Show." We need some space, and these framed prints are taking up alot of it. Which means we're putting them up for sale. If you missed this the first time around, it's a unique opportunity to buy individual prints out of some of our portfolios. Most prints are available framed and a few are from sold out editions: last call!

If you'd like to purchase anything send an email to brad@pressureprinting.com; we'll be taking things down as they sell:


Focus Study
Jim Woodring
framed; there are a few scuffs on the matte finish but it's in pretty good shape, #13/50
$100.00
SOLD
more info
The Four Reasons Jim Woodring
all framed and from portfolio #48/50 of this sold out edition
more info

#1 - $75.00

#2 - $75.00

#3 - $75.00

The Brine Queen Attaboy
unframed, #13/50 of a sold out edition
$150.00
more info


Butterflies in the Rain Alex Gross
unframed, #13/50 in a sold out edition
$100.00
SOLD
more info

Unattainable Beauty Gary Baseman
all unframed and from portfolio #29/30
more info

#1 - $50.00

#2 - $50.00
#3 - $50.00

#4 - $50.00

James Jean's Kindling, Many Other Things

It's been a little quiet around the blog as of late. Okay, alot quiet, six months of quiet, people emailing us to ask us if we're still in business quiet. Many things have conspired to keep us from making any noise, and most of them, I'm happy to report, are very good things. I'm finally allowed to share some news and there's so much to cover I hardly know where to start.

How about with our newest official release, "Kindling?"


We've had the honor and joy of working with James Jean before (also–did anyone see those Baby Tatooville nametags?), and so when Mr. Jean approached us with an image and proposal for a small edition, prints of which would go to both the Asian Art Musuem's permanent collection and a benefit auction by Hayao Miyazaki held at Pixar to save the Totoro Forest, we jumped at the chance.


James approaches the printmaking process with excitement and understanding. He knew exactly what he wanted and sent us a detailed proposal with the design, colors and printing processes all fully specified. It looked wonderful. And intimidating. It's safe to say that this print required the most precise registration we've ever attempted; it really pushed our use of hand-printing on 150-year old presses to a new level of exactitude.




With as much care as we could muster (think lots of bending over things with squinty eyes, loupes & micrometers), our first set of plates, with all of the wonkery of platemaking, hand-registration, wetting, drying, rewetting, and two runs through two separate presses, yielded prints in which the red image and the blue image consistently mismatched by about a sixty-fourth of an inch. Which is pretty gosh-darn good if you ask me: 1/64" is about the width of 4 human hairs. And it was very noticeable on every single test print! So we remade the red relief plate a 64th shorter and tried again, and sure enough things snapped a bit more into place.



We were hitting it within a 128th in any direction throughout the edition. As perfect as it gets in the imperfect world of hand-printing. The prints were then sent to James for a little hand-applied highlighting of the drops in white color pencil, and edition was complete.

• James Jean: Kindling


• Edition: 10, + 5 Artist's Proofs, 5 Printer's Proofs, and 1 Bon á tirer


• Print Size: 11.875" x 9.5"


• Intaglio and relief printed


• Printed on Rives BFK printmaking paper


• Hand-applied highlights in colored pencil by James Jean


• Signed & numbered by the artist

—

Another reason for our silence: Brad keeps doing very cool things and then, no matter how much I bug him about it, never can get around to blogging about them. Like, say, going on a weeklong trip to Japan in conjunction with Mark Ryden's Snow Yak Show, or heading out to LA for a weekend to meet with Pressure Printing artists past, present and future. Or, say, designing Todd Schorr's new book, "American Surreal," to be released by Last Gasp in conjunction with Todd's museum retrospective later this month at the San Jose Museum of Art.



Hopefully I can get Brad to write a more in depth post about this (huge!) project and all of the work that went into it, but suffice to say that Todd Shorr blows my mind, from what I gather one couldn't ask for a better guy to work with, and the book was a complete labor of love.

—

In addition to these projects for Mr. Schorr and Mr. Jean, we've been doing quite a bit of work for none other than Mr. Mark Ryden. For one, there was the twelve-color screenprint, "Silence," which we produced with Mark for MOCA. That print really deserves it's own post so I'll spare you the details for now.



Also, we have taken on the production and sales operations of Porterhouse Fine Art Editions. This has of course been amazing and fantastic, but I'm not sure what else I'm allowed to divulge before a miniature Abraham Lincoln appears behind me and silences me with his third eye and his mind.

—

But wait! There's more! There are all kinds of print projects in the works, many of which are shaping up to be released in bunches during the latter half of this year. So–speaking of Todd Schorr–keep an eye out for this guy:



And prints by Ron English, Femke, Travis Louie, and who knows maybe another James Jean will all hopefully be hitting our virtual shelves before December. Maybe a COOP too? Time will tell.

In any case, get set for an print-and-blog-post-packed rest of the year.

pressureprinting.com v2.0

After a couple of years of design and an intense final few months of production, today we're finally flipping the switch on the new pressureprinting.com.

Though the things we make –one of a kind handmade fine art prints made of real stuff like paper and ink– are about as far from the internet as you can get, in many ways one could call us a web company. All of our business takes place on the web, and for the sizable majority of you who've never toured our Denver, Colorado headquarters and who don't buy each and every project, Pressure Printing really is the website; it's the only way in which you interface with us and our projects. It's a pretty important part of who we are and what we do.

The old site served us tremendously well over its long, long life (circa 2002 - yesterday, R.I.P.). Like "Whip It" and your parents, it was rather radical in its day. We used Macromedia Flash for a neato scrolling-artists-names-navigation-bar. The site was entirely made up of images so that we could freely utilize fonts outside of the "web-safe" canon and have big, beautiful photography. Back in those days (before anyone knew what a YouTube was and MapQuest was blowing peoples' minds) it may have taken a little while to load on your 56k modem but once it did, www.pressureprinting.com was a pretty slick little site.

Time passed. As our list of artists grew longer the scrolling artist nav bar grew increasingly akin to a carousel, where one had to grope fleetingly for passing brass rings, and less like a workable user interface. Screen resolutions doubled and tripled but our website stayed the same size, eventually becoming a tiny box adrift in a huge, seemingly wasted sea of black. We made jokes about not being able to work with any new artists for lack of space on the front page ("Sorry, Mr. Crumb, but facts are facts and we're out of real estate"), and then nervously laughed, and then became silent.

Neato! Hope you're not in a hurry!

Negative space: not always a good thing.

We were overdue for a change.

And so a couple of years ago we started sketching some stuff out on paper and talking of something new. There would be bigger photography of course. A simple, streamlined, classic-looking design that would put everything you wanted at your fingertips and never get in the way of the art. Words like "honest," "clean," and "best website ever" came up whenever we discussed the look and feel of the thing. Here's an early version:



And here's a later one:


We went back and forth on whether it should be on black or white more than a few times.


Seeing as how most of our stuff is either on white paper or in black frames, there was no easy choice, but after much deliberation and a brief, misguided foray into grey we settled on the purer, brighter, cleaner, more gallery-esque choice.


Information moved from separate sections of the site into drop-down tabs, letting you learn more about various things without having to leave what you are looking at. We re-photographed every project, exchanging the dramatic, moody lighting of our old site for a clean and clear aesthetic which emphasizes texture and volume. What you see on the site is exactly what you get when you receive your print.

And a tiny subsection of the early versions of the site –a timeline of the history of Pressure Printing– came out of nowhere to really become the new site. As we fiddled and fussed we discovered that a timeline was an ideal way to organize all of our content on a single, clean, organized page which encouraged exploration, conveyed a wealth of information, and just plain looked good. Being able to quickly flick around and see all of the projects from the get-go instead of choosing from a text list was a huge leap. And with all of the projects there on view we could establish a few relationships between them. Obviously they are all laid out chronologically, so one can see at a glance what's new, what's old, and indeed the entire arc of Pressure Printing's history. But just as importantly, every project is displayed at relative scale. For the first time people can see just how big, say, "Exorcism" really is, in a way that reading "36in x 36in" doesn't fully convey. And once you click on something, we've tried to make drilling down into a project's detail images and information as seamless, intuitive, and silky-smooth as possible.

Design in hand, we worked with one of our closest friends and and longest-running associates to to realize it in all of its timeline-y, interactive glory as a full-fledged, honest to goodness, database driven, dynamic website / showcase / e-commerce solution.

Our sincere hope is that this second major version of pressureprinting.com is as unique, useful, and as eye-catching in the winter of 2008 as v1.0 was in the summer of 2002. We're ecstatic to finally get it out the door and share it with the world.