Pressure Printing: The Blog: Amphibian Frontier

We’ve loved Todd’s work forever and had the pleasure of designing his big monograph, “American Surreal” a couple of years ago; so it’s with great pleasure that we’re able to release our second project with him featuring the image that graced the cover of that book: “Amphibian Frontier.”

Todd writes in “American Surreal” that the image was born out of a free-associated mix of memories and artifacts from his 1950’s childhood: frog hunting, toy indians and a plastic Zorro, N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations in The Last of The Mohicans, and the traumatic experience of falling into a yellowjacket hive. Stirred together and shot through with yellow, the result is one of Todd’s most arresting images, released here for the first and only time.

We printed the edition using offset lithography to enable the scale and color that the image demands, and it came out beautifully. Todd works across scales so well, creating huge dynamic compositions that pop and grab you from afar which are rendered down to the atom and have a million little details to discover up close. So the only way to print this image was huge; the poster is three and a quarter feet tall. It’s on a satisfyingly heavy paper and we’ve added some blind embossed embellishments—a title, printer’s chops—as final touches.