Letterpress Triptych Concept and Process

The concept of my triptych series was to convey the good, the bad, and the ugly of my life in college. The social scene is what I believe to be one of the most fun aspects of college, so for "the good", I chose to illustrate a classic college drinking game, beer pong. For "the bad", I drew a stack of books as a representation of classes and studying, which always seems to interfere with the fun stuff, and for "the ugly" I illustrated a diploma because personally, I would like to stay in college for as long as I can! As an element of interest and playfulness, I used the drawings as letter forms within each word. Deciphering what the word spells out is slightly ambiguous, which is intentional because I did not want it to be blatantly obvious. The style of the illustrations helps with the ambiguity due to the loose, blind-contour-esque line drawings. Moreover, I wanted to have a vintage feel to the series, so I used a pencil to draw the illustrations and chose to print on a tan, textured paper with a burnt brick ink color.  The imperfect prints of the wood block letters helped further enhance the worn, vintage look I was striving for.

For each piece, I simply arranged the wood block letters to my liking, inked them, placed my paper on top, and ran it through the letterpress. Once dry, I drew my illustrations with pencil and cropped each work to 9" x 8".