For the love of printmaking

When I came across this print by Joey Hannaford, I just knew it would make an arresting cover. I love its graphic impact and the effect of overprinting the inks. The imperfection of the impressions shows off the beauty of wood type... and the XOX!? This issue is really "hugs and kisses" for the love of printmaking! 

The background pattern is always inspired by the issue's content, so I repeated a registration mark as the pattern motif. The bands of colours on the cover echo Joey's print, with the blue band and yellow band mixing together to create the green corner accent.

Here's an excerpt from the forthcoming article about Joey, written by Adrienne Breaux.

For Joey Hannaford, the printmaking process itself is a part of the exploration. All of her prints are monoprints—every piece is a single, solo, never-will-there-ever-be-another-like-it print. Because she inks the letters by hand, she claims she could not reproduce identical editions if she tried. She uses letterpress printing techniques not as a technical process to make reproduction easier, but as a vehicle for artistic expression. She sometimes refers to her work as “painterly letterpress prints.”

“I like the very accidental things that happen when I’m working iteratively. When I’m making the prints, it’s almost like a recording of the things I’m thinking about at that moment in time,” says Joey. “It’s using the printmaking process as an evolution of developing images rather than developing them to a certain point, ‘freezing’ them and then editioning them.”

Read more in issue 25.