Process: BlobFest

I finished another poster this week! It's amazing how much work we've been able to get done at Hatch, and immensely satisfying! This one is for 'BlobFest,' a movie festival that happens in Pennsylvania every year, in the town that the movie The Blob was actually filmed in. They even host it in the actual theater one part of the movie takes place in, and do a re-enactment of the scene.

They've ordered posters from Hatch for the past three years, but this year they upped the order from 2-color to three! This means more fun for me, because I get to do more layers :). Seen above is the title font for 'BlobFest,' in which I called out the 'O' (to be printed in a different color), to accentuate the circular blobbiness of the event.

This is the proof of how the poster will look, sans actual colors. Hatch has an actual 'blob' block that was used for the past two posters, but frankly it looks kind of like a slab of Spam with a hole cut through the middle. So I vetoed the block and instead wanted to make my own 'blob' out of groups of overlapping circles (made possible by the fact that I was allowed to use three colors).

I also really wanted to reference all those awesome old 1950's Sci-fi movie posters by putting a screaming woman on it. We didn't have one in the shop, but Brad said I could carve one!

Above is my process of transferring the screaming woman onto the linoleum. First, I had to blow the image up to the appropriate size (made possible by a convenient proportion wheel). Then, I traced over the image with tracing paper, and flipped it over to rub the graphite onto the lineloum. Once I had a faint image on the block, I colored over it with sharpie.

After gluing the linoleum to a block, I carved it out. It took a while, and my hands definitely started to get sore.

AAAAHHHH!

Now, I could start printing!
Here's the first color on the press:

I added a TON of transparency to the red, since I was planning to overlap two layers of it.

And the second color on top!

I really love how the reds look together. Since I added transparent ink to lighten the color (instead of white) it turned a nice salmon-red instead of pink.

And now comes the time in every printer's life where the color they wanted to print just doesn't work at all. I had a vision of printing yellow type over the two reds, which seemed like it might look awesome. Unfortunately, it didn't! Luckily, it's not a huge deal to clean the press and start over with a new color. After conferencing with Brad, we decided a plum purple might be a good alternative.

I really love this shade of purple!

We stack the posters vertically so they don't offset onto each other (this particular paper is thick, so once you get a bunch in a stack it gets pretty heavy!)

And the final poster trimmed! I'm pretty happy with this one.
TA DAA!