You Ain't No Punk You Punk

Inspired by the title of volume 6 of byNWR (possibly my second favorite thing on the internet at the moment), I letterpressed this poster:

It was printed using letters made of strips of duck tape at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts on a Vandercook SP15. The white background is the result of an intentional printing mistake: the duck tape letters didn’t have much depth to them, so the paper form that the letters were taped to also ended up getting inked and printing. The small strips on the sides are normal adhesive tape used to hold the lines of text together.

Printing was quick, fun, and fairly easy, although along the way a few letters did tear off and have to be reset. The form however really did not hold up well so I could only print ten posters.

This experiment with duck tape was inspired by a recent series of prints I made using paper tape, also with white ink on black paper (I’ll share those at some point too but they are for an ongoing project and I have to make the damn thing happen first). Those first prints unintentionally captured a punk aesthetic that you don’t really see too much in letterpress. It would also be difficult to convincingly pull off on a computer, whereas it’s simple with letterpress. You can see just how I threw this thing together and all the mistakes I made along the way. Not “beautiful” exactly, but I like the direction and I will probably continue exploring it.

Which is all pretty much a long way of saying: after this, I can probably never show my face in Switzerland again.