Letterpress Crows

In an amongst all of my graduate show prep, I'm also consumed by an awesome new project illustrating Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple's Crow Not Crow. I don't know how much longer I'll have access to the letterpress capabilities here at the University of Edinburgh College of Art and I really wanted to see what the title would look like using this lovely and ancient style of printing. Luckily, folks are moving past the making of art to the hanging of art for the shows, so the print lab was blissfully uncrowded. The nice thing, too, is how comfortable I've grown with these processes. I'm able to just pop in, print some items, clean up and pop out with ease. Love it!
I collected the letters I wanted to use in various fonts, then I put them together and inked them on this gorgeous and ancient Eagle press.
Here's what I did.
You'll notice that some of the letters were missing from some of the fonts. Also, I printed them several times to get various degrees of degradation in the text. I scanned them in and created the full text.
I tried adding a crow drawing to see if I liked it.
And yeah, I like it, but not for a picture book. This looks more like a whisky bottle label or some such. So, next I tried to create some hand drawn text.
I liked this much better....

What? You think I'm going to show you? No way man! Not yet!

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