Overviews on Overprinting
For printmakers, overprinting has always been a pretty necessary part of the printing process. Within the world of commercial printing, overprinting may not be so typical, assuming you exclude the overlap of dots in 4 color process printing. In either case there exist some great instances that explore overprinting from a place other than simply the need to achieve more colors.
Putting life into a low budget
In the nineties, Basel designers Muller+Hess created this series of monthly event calendars. Rather than print a one-color calendar every month (what most designers would do with a small budget), they purchased a year’s worth of paper, printed a one-color calendar for the first month on every sheet, distributed a portion, and each month thereafter, added a new color to the remaining sheets. In the end they had an amazing visual record of the year’s events. This visual concept could never have been achieved with the given budget if printed all at once.
Surprise factor
London designer Daniel Eatock invited 12 artists/designers to create a poster promoting an exhibition that would also feature these posters. Eatock’s own work, decided prior to seeing the finished submissions, was to be all 12 posters printed on a single sheet. This is pretty risky. It’s often difficult to imagine what 2 overprinted colors might achieve, so imagine 12 4-color posters overprinted. The results could be spectacular or they could be horrible. This case is questionable. But what is great is the surprise element and the commitment to an idea with no control over the outcome.
The art of test prints
As screenprinters, overpriniting isn’t really anything new for Aesthetic Apparatus. Where it gets interesting is in the test prints they create. Basically, before wasting good sheets of paper, you want to do some tests on sheets that already have printing on them. It’s likely that many of these hit the trash, but occasionally, the results are more interesting than any of the individual posters that were being test printed. What do you do with these? Sell them as one of kind works of art, of course.
Discovering space where there is none
In the May issue of the Canadian edition of Vice Magazine, BMW and Vice pushed the limits of ad space, by overprinting a BMW ad onto the cover of the magazine using glow-in-the-dark ink. This allowed the cover to live by day and the ad to live by night with no compromise to the integrity of either. Pretty much a win-win as this cover as a whole, due to the overprinting technique, is more interesting than the isolated Vice cover shot and BMW ad.
smart post.
Process is the content!