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.