Annual House Walk

This is the first letterpress poster I've done in quite a while. The Rogers Park / West Ridge Historical Society is having their Annual House Walk on May 2nd and they needed some posters for advertising as well as a program cover. I worked with them to design a poster that was both retro and modern, historical and deco. While a good amount of them were digitally printed for placing around the neighborhood, they also commissioned me to do a limited edition commemorative letterpress run of 75. These will be for sale at the House Walk, and proceeds will benefit the Historical Society.


The prints were done using bark colored ink on 80 lb. Speckletone stock (100% recycled, PCF).


As expected, I achieved a good level of impression on the sparser sections of text, and the heavily detailed image in the middle came out crisp as well.



Since these are 17" x 10.5", I wasn't able to print them on Leonard (my 8" x 12" C&P platen press). I rented time on a Vandercook proofing press, and man was it nice to not have those uneven inking issues I get on Leonard. Of course, it gets exhausting to manually roll each individual print on a Vandercook as opposed to the automatic printing action of Lenoard. Someday I'd like to add a Vandercook to my collection, for smaller runs and larger prints like this.


The prints are signed and numbered - I knew someday there would be a reason I practiced my rockstar signature so hard.