Letterpress: Dogwood Cards

I printed some dogwood cards using a vintage cut that is at the studio where I teach a few years ago. You can see those cards over at this blog post. They’ve always been a big hit but I wanted to do some using my own personal illustrations now that I’ve come farther in my business. I used these dogwood flowers recently on an update to my desktop dumpster and thought they’d be a great test print of this style of floral drawing.

I got the polymer plates for this when I ordered some wedding invitation images and trimmed it down for immediate use. I have been slowly working on adjusting my press for use of these polymer plates. I have to raise my rollers much higher to run them through appropriately. In the photo below, you can see a ton of blue painters tape running up and down on some rails of my press. It has been a tedious process to get it right per image.

I printed these cards using a coral ink that I had laid out for another client’s project. It was a beautiful color to mix up. I also printed it on the same linen paper since I had extra supplies lying around.

I love the texture of this paper and the way it takes to a pen for little greeting cards. I already had some matching envelopes in stock so this whole project was run on a very low budget.

I plan on saving this dogwood cut for future use and testing it on some alternative surfaces.

If you would like to pick up a card to send out, grab one on Etsy today.