Poster Mountain

We are doing our first ever Flashback Friday post! A few weeks ago I was looking through some of our old blog projects and found an unfinished blog about a fruit crate label. We used to do dozens of these and although the demand has slowed down they are still one of my favorite pieces of vintage advertising to work on.  Crate labels are usually on very thin paper which were glued to the sides of the wooden crates that the fruit was shipped in, which explains why the corners are often missing, such as in the Pinnacle Brand label featured in this post. Here's the Before photo Despite missing all four corners this crate label was still in pretty good condition since the majority of the image was still there and we could tell what the missing text was supposed to say. This project is from about two years ago (I know because it was before I chopped off most of my hair!) Step one was to wash out any impurities and then put the label through our isinglass gelatin treatme...

Alright, we are finally concluding our series on the Sarah Bernhardt American Tour poster designed by Alfonse Mucha. The last post covered airbrushing. This post will look at the final step in our restoration process which is detailing. Detailing is pretty much just what it sounds like, putting details back in, but don't let that simple explanation fool you. Detailing is easy to overlook, but the process of putting minute design elements and pigments in by hand is time consuming and requires a great deal of patience. (We have spent numerous hours fixing bad restoration and it is a tribute to the skills of our team how often we are asked to fix poor restoration.)   This is a great shot of Gabe doing detail work. All those areas of white will eventually be painted by hand. Poster Mountain uses a combination of water color and colored pencils for detailing. The goal in detailing is to mimic the color, texture and design of the original. This often includes building ...

Picking up where we left off last week, the Sarah Bernhardt poster was through prep and headed to our restoration artists. I must admit that while I take hundreds of photos for most of the blog posts, the guys in the back are often hard to capture at work because they are a little camera shy. I usually have to sneak up on them from behind. (Ok, maybe I also like sneaking up on them and getting candid photos.) Gabe, Aaron, Ravi and Pete all worked on this poster. Gabe began by sketching in the general areas of large patterns and noting color blocks that we would need to airbrush in. Once he had a general idea of what needed to be done, Pete took over to mask for airbrushing. Airbrushing is generally how we cover large areas of paper evenly with color. This can mean applying uniform layers of one color, or layering multiple colors on top of each other to achieve a look similar to that of most printing processes. Masking covers certain areas of a poster or print with paper, tape ...

 Last week's blog covered the linen backing and the removal of the facing holding this delicate Sarah Bernhardt poster together. This week's post will look at the prep work necessary in order for our restoration artists to do such an amazing job. For those of you new to our work, prep work is the preparation needed before we add image back in. This can mean stabilization of tears, dealing with creases and folds or in the case of this particular piece filling in areas and holes where paper is missing. And as you can see from the photo below, there are some rather significant chunks missing from this print. (Although we have seen and fixed worse!) Progress photo taken after linen backing, but before any restoration work started We have boxes and boxes of vintage posters and pieces of paper. Paper comes in varying thicknesses, colors and styles, so we try to find the most appropriate paper for each piece that we patch.  Jairo and I worked on prepping this piece toge...

Hello! As usual I am starting with a disclaimer about why we haven't posted much... we've been busy. But I am working on a plan to start doing more posts and updates. Additionally, we have also begun to expand our social media presence and now have Instagram and Twitter accounts up and running. Please check those out to see daily photos from around the shop. Poster Mountain's Twitter and Instagram will, as the name implies feature predominately posters: please follow us @ postermount on Twitter and postermountain on Instagram. Our subsidiary company, Los Angeles Paper Group will be showcasing the fine art side of the company: @ LAPaperGroup on Twitter and LAPaperGroup on Instagram. Back to our sporadically scheduled program! When we last posted the Sarah Bernhardt print was finally relieved of its old and decrepit backing, but was still mounted face down. Our next step was to remove it from the temporary face down position and to linen back it to fresh linen and pa...