Poster Mountain

When we left off with Part 1 of Harvey Girls the poster had been through conservation and was mounted to linen with a Masa substrate. Pictured: Progress photo taken after linen backing and before restoration. The areas where we had removed tape from were missing paper and all the fold lines had hardened. So, the first step was to patch the areas where parts of the poster were missing. We have a collection of old posters that have been donated to us that we use to patch. Melissa and I try to find the most appropriate paper in terms of color and texture for each piece we work on. We miter in the paper patches (how exactly involves some voodoo and a couple of virgins), so that when you run your hands over the patch it blends seamlessly with the original poster. With something this big I trace and cut all of the patches out first so that I get into a rhythm with gluing them in. I basically work in a big circle so that by the time I've finished gluing in the last patch, the  f

 Poster Mountain has built its reputation over the last 20 years primarily on restoring vintage movie posters. Recently we have had a huge boom in contemporary silk screens, but this week we are going back to our roots to show you the restoration of a 1946 Harvey Girls three sheet. For those of you who don't know a three sheet is the size of three one sheets. A one sheet measures 27 x 41, so a three sheet is 41x 81.  This poster came in pretty wrecked. It had chunks missing from it and pieces of tape holding other parts of it together. We do a lot of tape removal, hence why we are always cautioning people that there is no such thing as archival tape. Pictured: The poster with tape along the fold lines, holding it together. Aaron, our airbrusher, is also a master at tape removal. Using a heat gun to loosen the adhesive he slides a sharpened palette knife under the tape to peel it off the poster without causing undo damage. There is usually a sticky residue left behind

In the last few months we have worked on a lot of contemporary silkscreens and it has been a joy to see the range of posters that are being produced. Most of the silkscreens that we have done have only needed minor work; fixing dents and creases with a couple needing ink loss restored. However, we received a Martin Ansin The Mummy a few weeks ago that had 3 tears along the top that went all the way into the image. Pictured: This is the before photo that the client took. Our first step was to put it through John's Isinglass process to get the piece flat and on a board so that we could begin restoration work. (If you have questions about what the Isinglass process is, you can check out the blog we did about a Tyler Stout Lost silkscreen .) Pictured: Martin Ansin's silkscreen of The Mummy before we began work on it, Once the print was soft mounted on the melamine board, Melissa took charge of the piece. The resizing process had helped with the tear, but there was