visualchemist

I was itching to use my vintage wood type so I printed up three sets of valentine’s day cards over the weekend. I hope to build up a line of typography driven cards for now, then branch out and do the fancy stuff later. I’ll add to the collection soon, so keep checking back. These guys are now on sale through my etsy shop.

Along with mixing custom colors, last night, I also printed up some new blind letterpress cards for Etsy. The message is quiet and simply stated. I didn’t really want to add color, leaving this card open to alternate envelope colors.

The other day, I made my first sale on Etsy. Woohoo! So, last night I was inspired to print up a few more letterpress greeting cards to add to my tiny, but growing, collection. I wanted to test some of the vintage blocks I had laying around. Some worked and some didn’t. The teddy bear I had hoped to print needed a little shaving on the edges. The turntables I printed up were just eh. I managed to put this little (big) piggy and an old moving truck to good use. I also printed up some vintage type blinds on the cool tags I bought weeks ago. I’ll be posting these items for sale on my Etsy shop (visualchemist.etsy.com) real soon. By the way, I finally fixed the header links up above. Now if only I can finish up my sites.

This vintage blue pig is actually part of a larger collection. Eventually, I hope to design twelve cards representing the entire Chinese zodiac lineup.

This card was inspired by good times and great friends. I have yet to verify this typeface and measure the height of this larger font.

Simple and sophisticated. No ink. Oooohh aaaahhhh, my favorite so far. This type was set using 36pt Stymie Light.

I bought this block because moving may be in our future. Someday.

I’ll be adding plenty more cards to my collection in the near future. Thanks for stopping by!

VINTAGE PRINT BLOCK

The other day, I purchased a vintage print block with a really awesome deer graphic. I couldn’t wait to see how it printed. Though it looked worn down in the photos, I thought I’d try it out and see what happens. It really did look like it had been around for quite a while, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. You just never know with these things. Maybe it’s got a little more mileage left in it, maybe not. I took the chance, not wanting to pass up a really great piece, and besides, I thought it would go perfect with some thank you cards I had in mind.

CENTURY GOTHIC

Puns are silly fun, and some can even be quite clever. I enjoy them, or anything that has to do with a play on words. When I saw this deer, I immediately knew I wanted to create a “Thank You, Deer” card. For my type, I used Century Gothic for its clean and modern characteristics. Setting this short sentence in my composing stick took less than 5 minutes. It was playing around with the tracking and kerning that took forever.

LOCKED UP DEER

Here he is, all inked up and ready to be cleaned. As you can see, I didn’t really set up my composing stick properly. To correctly center my type, I should have put equal amounts of spacing on both ends of the line.

THANK YOU DEER

To correct this, when locking up my deer, the reglets needed to be adjusted to place him centered just above my uncentered type. So really, this is a lesson on what NOT to do. What I should have done was take that extra minute to set my type up properly.

Here is the final product. I’m not thrilled with how it came out, but for a second project, again, it’s not terrible. I’ll have to do another run of these cards when I have the time.