Poster Printing Whoa

The poster was birthed at the printer this week! It is so awesome!  I can't wait for everyone to see it. So much work is shown in these prints.  Its overwhelming and also super exciting to think about the next stage of this work's life- being out in the world, shakin the ground & watering seeds of change!

I wanted to show some of the pictures from this week. It was a much more satisfying week at the printer than last time, since we walked away with finalized posters in our hands. Woohoo!

This is the printer we print the poster on.

The printer is probably about 60 feet long. It is a model from the 60's and there are only a handful of these around the US. The guy Mike who runs the machine has been working at this printer for 7 years and is a PRO at this thing. Inspiring to watch him work.

Ever wonder what CMYK stands for?  Well, it's the 4 ink colors that create almost everything that we see on any given printed page.  Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.  These 4 pictures show the incredibly detailed rolling mechanism that helps the inks to perfectly evenly roll onto each page. 

Cyan

Yellow

Black

Magenta

This is the blue plate of the poster running.  AH! So cool! I totally geeked out over this whole process.

This is Mike looking through a magnifying glass to see if the registration of the CMYK plates are lined up on the print itself.

This is the view inside the magnifying glass. Success! They are all lined up! If they weren't you would see tiny dots of one of those colors peeking out from under the layered black dots we see here. 

Mike lowering the sheets down for a test-run of folding.

Ethan, Ralph and the scoring master decide on methods of scoring the poster.

We had so many discussions about the levels of all the colors until it was PERFECT.

Is it perfect yet?

Me signing off that it is perfect.

Another shot of one of the plates, ready to run.

Zoe examining the poster (or checking her phone...)

Holy moly! 1,100 posters have been printed!!!

Nicole, gazing at this poster after dedicating 5 years of her life to working on the smallest of details of the illustration. The poster has been in the process of being created for 9 years.

This is a tiny crop of the poster. Every inch of this 6-ft-long poster is as highly detailed as this. I can't upload the full poster image because it's too big for this right now, but maybe I'll figure out how to do that soon. 

living every day

Today is Saturday. Today is Saturday. Today is Saturday.  I've lost track of days of the week up here.  Today is Saturday.

First off,  check this out!  I feel like this is a "Look what I did, Mom!" moment.  I have been doing the graphics for a band called Phillybloco for the past 4 years and two the the members of the band just married each other (so cute I want to barf), and THESE pictures popped up on facebook!  

This is the wedding cake with my designs on the top and bottom layers!

the happy couple with the cake

the design is from the drums that i painted for the band.  this shot is cool for really selfish reasons, actually.  i designed their shirts, designed the logo projected in the back, and designed & hand painted the drums, and know how to play most of those drums (not that well anymore since i havent played in over a year.. yikes), but still makes this photo super fun for me. ha!

Ok. Enough patting myself on the back.  

I found this picture and my heart melted. I miss my cat so much that my heart literally melts a little when I think of her.

But I'm up here working very hard.  These are some pictures of the work I've been doing.

This is Dylan working on the stop motion animation we did most recently.

The building we are working in is an old building that has a lot of construction going on with it. This is a shot of Ethan & Zoe illustrating next to the window. You can't see it too well, but outside the window is the river that I love here.

This is another shot of the river. These little falls here are called Bad Little Falls.

This is Ethan being a weirdo while he's drawing.

This is Dylan and Nicole working on another stop motion animation we did this week.

Its so much fun! 

This is Josh helping with the movement of the camera as it rolls around the room.

Josh and Dylan working on filming.

 The below 2 images are some notes that I think are interesting. The one on the left is a list of rules about what goes into a poster here at the Beehive.  The one on the right is some more process items.

And this is me fake-drawing on the huge poster that we are in the process of getting out into the world.

Soooooo yeah thats what I got for ya right now.

working on the kickstarter

Just wanted to put up a couple pictures of the project i'm working on right now. We're covering a room of an old 5&10 store with photos that tell the story of the beehive collective that we can film in sequence and use in the kickstarter video we're working on.  The map pictured is a map I made that will be used to highlight middle America. There will be a little animation of where folks spent time to do research for the latest poster project, which we are in the process of printing right now.  The woman pictured in the first photo is Kehben, who's one of the original folks who started the beehive collective back in 2001 or something.  The man in blue is Eric, who owns one of the houses we live in. He's awesome.

Ok back to work.