Recently our shop Mirror Image printed a seven color print for Farm Aid. Farm Aid is a nonprofit started in 1985 by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp to help family farmers who were losing their land during the farm crisis. Dave Matthews later joined its board. Its best-known event is the annual benefit concert, held in a different city each year, which raises money and attention for family farms. The rest of the year it runs a hotline for farmers in trouble, gives grants to farm organizations, and pushes for policies that favor family-scale farming over corporate agriculture.
We were aided by the master printer and all around fun guy Andy MacDougall. Here seen with printer Jessica Bahl checking out the results after the last color went down. That is an M&R Saturn press.
We were also lucky to work directly with the artist Chloe Alexander in the shop. It was work but it was actually fun. The beauty of the results are difficult to truly understand with photos because screenprinting on paper has a depth that a digital representation never truly captures.
In the blog the colors are laid out in order of how we printed them:
Some action shots:
Andy explaining the workings of the press to artist Chloe Alexander and printer Eliot Neff.
We used an M&R Saturn press. It is a solid machine with the key being a flat level heavy duty table with a good vacuum.Andy’s handiwork, hands that have probably adjusted a million pieces of paper to be printed.
We were aided by the master printer and all around fun guy Andy MacDougall. Here seen with printer Jessica Bahl checking out the results after the last color went down. The hands on training was very effective, Jessica was printing posters on her own successfully the next week.
Artist Chloe Alexander is a printer herself, which is such a key ingredient in the process of creating good art for printing. Andy’s smile reveals another key element, who wants to do any of this if you can’t have some fun with it as well.
The final product. We have sold out the Farm Aid limited editions but this year we had rain at the show, which is not conducive to selling things made of paper… Some are still available at the Farm Aid official store.
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