Charleston Wine + Food Festival 2014 Cards

We were thrilled to work with Charleston Wine + Food Festival to print custom cards for the 2014 festival. Local artist Lisa Shimko did the painting for the upcoming festival poster.

This was the first time we’ve printed a piece based off of a painting, and in order to reproduce the design via letterpress printing, we needed to break down the design for the card (the fish jumping out of the mason jar) into two or three colors max. We produced a three-color print using warm gray, bright orange, and plum-wine colors.

Since each color is a separate pass through the press, we weren’t able to see how the finished card would look until the end. Here’s an in-progress photo after printing the first two colors.

Each ink color was mixed by hand:

And then hand-fed into the press:

I love how the overprinting of the plum-wine color onto the orange actually looks like a fourth color (black):

Such a fun project! It really was amazing to see all of the colors come together to produce the end piece.

And along with picking up tickets to the 2014 festival, you can also purchase one of the cards (each card is paired with a recycled kraft envelope).