The Morning Goblin! ☕️➡️😊
This fall we were invited to join the @canadian.letterpress.alliance , a collective of 50+ letterpress artists across Canada. This group exchanges prints throughout the year and for the first ever print exchange we decided to do something a little different.
Kyle had been wanting to create a two part story where a goblin transforms into a happy person after their morning coffee.
He designed a storyboard to work with an infinity, or never-ending, card mechanism (basically a folding structure that moves through four panels to tell a story on a loop).
We filmed the whole process (up on YouTube) and are so pleased with the end result. We created 51 in the edition.
Are you also a morning goblin or are you a morning person? Drop a ☕️ or a 😊 below.
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#letterpress #printmaking #infinitycard #printmakers #princeedwardcounty #printexchange #morningcoffee #coffeelovers #letterpressprinting #printmakersofinstagram #canadianartist #printstudio #interactiveart #papercrafts #printcommunity
Excited about the video of Kyle cleaning up this beautiful Challenge Proof Press (on YouTube channel)! Swipe to see the after! Give us some🔥below if you love the transformation! 👇
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#vintagefinds #deepclean #vintageprint #proofpressprintmaking #printmakersofinstagram #printstudio #printsnotdead #restoration #printmaker #artvlog
💫 KYLE TOPPING - Printmaker 💫
This week we are delighted to feature our 2024 County Arts Professional Development Grant Recipients, starting with Kyle Topping of Sparkbox Studio!
Kyle shares the following about the impact of his 2024 PD grant in this testimonial: "I feel very grateful to have had this opportunity to attend the Zea Mays Printmaking Residency Fellowship in Florence, Massachussetts. It recharged my confidence in the process of etching and brought new insights that will be beneficial to my community print shop. I am excited about the processes and techniques I learned and what they will bring to my practice."
🎉 Congratulations to Kyle!
Our Professional Development Grants are made possible through the Artist Fund, and aim to support Prince Edward County artists as they advance their career through learning / skills-building and market development activities.
👀 We are currently preparing to welcome 2025 applications - stay tuned for the launch coming soon!
#countyarts #princeedwardcounty #artistfund #countyup @sparkboxstudio
Image description: Kyle Topping creating in the Zea Mays printmaking studio during his residency.
We did it!
‘Come on In’ is installed in the Barlow Room at The Royal Hotel. We’re still kind of catching up on sleep after working some super late nights completing this piece.
We’ve always been drawn to making work that invites people to look closer and explore. When the curators Christina Zeidler and Stacey Sproule gave us the theme of hotels through the lens of film and words like liminal space and in-between we couldn’t stop thinking about luggage and hallways. Both connected directly to life in transit, and the feeling of waiting to arrive somewhere.
We decided to create a sculptural piece of stacked of old luggage, and in-between the cases would contain liminal worlds.
This was our first time working with mirrors and pen and ink drawings to create illusions. This piece taught us a lot about how to use mirrors and light to extend drawings and lengthen space (it also taught us the going rate for vintage luggage is more expensive than we expected).
Come see it in person if you can.
Hotel Confidential at The Royal Hotel, Prince Edward County
Opening Reception: April 17, 7:30 – 9pm
Exhibition: April 18 – 19, 11am – 5pm
@countyarts@theroyalhotelpicton
We have a new project in the works that we’re excited about.
In April we’ll be part of Hotel Confidential, a three day art exhibition at @theroyalhotelpicton here in Picton done in collaboration with @countyarts . Sixteen artists will be taking over the guest rooms and shared spaces with site-specific installations.
We’ll be in the Barlow Room. We can’t show you everything yet but we can tell you there will be luggage, and if you look closely enough between it, you might find something unexpected 😉.
More soon.
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#artistprocess #worksinprogress #behindthescenes #studiolife #artistlife visitpicton
⭐ Join us on Sunday March 22nd for the first Public Art Workshop Series!
Answering the Call: All Things Public Art Applications with Chrissy Poitras and Kyle Topping of Spark Box Studio
A practical session on navigating applications to public art open calls. Chrissy and Kyle will break down the application process into manageable steps, sharing the tools and strategies they use to develop compelling applications, plan projects, and work within real-world constraints.
This workshop is free, but space is limited. Register now through the link in bio or visit:
countyarts.ca/public-art/
County Arts is thrilled to partner with the Municipality through the new Public Art Program to present a series of workshops aimed at providing artists with opportunities to build skills to aid in the creation of Public Artworks. County Arts is the County’s Public Art Program Administrator and as we plan our commissions and first few projects we are offering these workshops to prepare artists to respond to future open calls.
#countyarts #publicart #pecarts #princeedwardcounty #murals
Image description: Chrissy and Kyle posing on ladders with paintbrushes outside Kelly's shop, with text that reads: "Public Art Workshop Series: Answering the Call: All Things Public Art Applications with Spark Box Studio, Sunday March 22nd, 1-5 pm, County Arts Lab" and The County and County Arts logos.
The studio had a big shift at the end of last year. My grandfather, who was a woodworker and a metal worker, left his shop with us and so his tools came to live in our printmaking studio.
Something that I found so delightful while putting them all away in their new home was that he engraved his name on many of them.
Our print shop is filled with so many old tools and pieces of equipment. It’s something we love about our craft - that the tools we have are passed down rather than purchased new.
I’m still getting used to seeing my grandfather’s tools in our shop, but I kind of love to think that they are living amongst many other tools once used by many other grandfathers.
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#printmaking #traditionalcraft #printstudio #toolsofthetrade
I’m teaching a workshop tonight on social media and someone asked me about polls in reels — so let’s try one.
I thought a video of coating screens would be a great one to use for a poll because when we were running the residency we learned that the screen printing world has feelings about coating one side or two. In our undergrad we only ever coated one, and that’s how we’ve done it ever since.
But I’m curious — one side or two? Vote below.
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#printmaking #silkscreen #screenprint #artquestion #printcommunity
Bundle 2 of the @canadian.letterpress.alliance print exchange did not disappoint!
This collection had us stopping so often to appreciate how awesome these prints are. Sometimes it was reading a poem hiding behind a vellum overlay; other times it was scanning a QR code that opened into a whole podcast episode, or flipping a print over to find a story about a tightrope walker at Niagara Falls.
One print is literally a single frame from an animated fireworks video. Another is printed on an old library card pulled from inside a book. Our personal fav was a pocket guide to gnomes 💛
What we love about this exchange is how generously each maker shares their world. One printmaker can’t always find the time and/or money to travel, so he travels through his linocuts instead. We think a lot of artists will understand that feeling (we certainly can).
Full unboxing on YouTube — link in bio.
Printmakers featured (in order of slides):
Weathervane Press
Whisky Jack Press
Walpurgis Press
Weathervane Press
Talk Paper Scissors
Pat McIlroy
DUST.IN.INK
Woodshed Press
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#letterpress #letterpressprinting #printmaking #handprinted #typeobsessed printcommunity canadianprintmakers printinspiration linocut bookarts
🤨 Can we use any ink to print kitchen lithography? That’s the question we want to answer in our newest video.
We have a number of different inks in our studio - rubber-based, oil-based, water-based, oil-based but water soluble. We’ve really only used with the rubber-based inks when making kitchen lithos, so we thought we would spend some time exploring the possibilities of the other inks to see the limitations. We had our suspicions but were hopeful that more than just one of our inks would work.
We can’t wait to test out even more in the shop this week (we’re making a tiny press!)
#kitchenlitho #printmaking #litho #canadianprintmakers
Our first infinity card for the @canadian.letterpress.alliance print exchange. Four panels that loop forever, just like our daily morning coffee cycle: goblin → coffee → human → sleep → repeat.
Swipe through the transformation.
The edition size was 51 for this print. We shared the full printing process on YouTube.
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#letterpress #printmaking #infinitycard #printmakers #coffeelovers
Been thinking about this quote a lot lately: “Play is one of those things. We might make do without it, but we wouldn’t create …” Maria Popova
We’ve been investing in play in the print studio (and stepping away from the digital screens). We’re experimenting with kitchen lithography, testing which inks in our shop work with the process and which ones don’t. So far, it’s been mixed success, but that’s how experimentation goes.
Second image is of me with my plate right before I ruined it during printing.
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