[image description: 9 photos of a combination letterpress and hand-drawn print of Thanatos from the

[image description: 9 photos of a combination letterpress and hand-drawn print of Thanatos from the game Hades, process photos, and the formes of lead type used to print it. it’s a 5.375x10 inch piece, black pen drawing illustrating Thanatos inside a loose & lightweight frame of broken stone railings, burning candles, and bleeding heart flowers. The letterpress elements are his name, and the color of his cloak, rendered in a relief-printed repeating geometric pattern in greyish purple. The pattern doesn’t contour to folds of the fabric, but it is half the depth of color where, in context of the illustration, it shows the back side of the fabric, like the inside of his hood. individual photo IDs under the cut.]HELLO, Desert Bus 2021 starts streaming tomorrow (Nov. 12th), playing the worst game of all time to raise money for Child’s Play! They do a lot of other fun stuff on stream as well since, you know, the worst game of all time, including auctions and giveaways, and i donated a set of three Hades prints that are scheduled for giveaway in the noon-6 pm slot Thursday the 18th!honestly i debated mmmm quite a bit, which 3 characters to do, there’s some tempting element to every single design in the game—but my boy. my guy Thanatos. this enormous, swoopy swathe of fabric, the cavernous hood!! had to do it.of course then i sketched it and one solid print of the pattern was going to be too much, too hard to read as a 3d object. i had to distinguish parts of the cloak from each other somehow, didn’t want to change the angle of the pattern for a couple reasons, didn’t think i could get the registration i needed between two different masks, SO. treated it like pressure printing! made one single big mask. cut my ink in half with transparent. printed the whole area of fabric once (3 passes, i don’t have all that much of the decoratives i wanted to use :[ ) in pale purple. cut away the tympan backer in all the areas that needed to stay pale, as the back side of the fabric. went back and hit the whole print a second time, with the formes and mylar in the same positions, but there’s not enough pressure anymore to imprint those lighter areas. tadaaaaaa gosh bleeding hearts are fun to draw. they’re such weird little alien creatures. Name set in Torino.more wip : Megaera : Zagreus1: a photo of the complete print, where Thanatos hovers above his name, framed by crumbling stone railings. the bottom left and top right corners are covered in clusters of bleeding heart flowers, and in nestled in the flower clusters are his Pierced Butterfly keepsake and Companion Mort. the right side of the frame is implied by tall candles and their smoke wisps.2-5: closeups of the finished print, showing details like the smoke wisps, the impression of the relief printing on his name, and places where the letterpress-printed pattern changes from deep purple to pale purple, where fabric in the illustration folds over to show its reverse side.6 & 7: process photos of the masking process used to print the letterpress material in the irregular area of illustrated fabric. the decorative pieces cover a larger, rectangular area, and the print is protected from printing in the negative space by a hand-cut mask from mylar. to bring the positive space up to printing pressure, a matching set of tympan paper packing is cut to match the mylar mask, and pasted into the press so that the print is sandwiched between paper packing and mylar mask, and printed through the hole in the mylar. the second photo shows the mask in place, and the backer behind reduced to only the pieces that were double-hit for extra color depth.8 & 9: photos of the handset formes used to print the pattern and Thanatos’ name. these formes need to be lifted up, carried, and held vertically in the bed of the clamshell press, so all negative space around the individual letters and decorative pieces are filled with shorter pieces, too low to ink or print. then pressure is applied by wedges to two sides of the forme, inside a rectangular cast iron frame, so that the whole frame and all the assembled pieces inside it can be lifted up. -- source link

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