Poster Mountain

Yesterday we finished up with the conservation and structural stabilization of a 1950s Children's Hospital toy box. Today we are continuing with the restoration. The flap that was added that was part of the missing section from a side of the box, the patch over the corner and all of the small tears needed to be addressed. This was done through a combination of airbrushing and detail work. Gabe took care of the masking, starting off with the yellow of the crescent moon.  Pictured: The acetate mask was done by Gabe, so that once Aaron had matched the color of the moon he just had to evenly cover the open area. Pictured: Progress shot of the airbrushed moon, it's only partially finished. Pictured: Tada! New moon! The next step was to airbrush the blue-green background color. This meant masking off all of the yellow and the print on the box. Its also really obvious here why taking apart the box to make it lay flat made it easier to work on. Imagine trying to prep,

Poster Mountain is a paper based conservation company, but that doesn't always mean that our work is limited to posters and prints. This week we are posting about the restoration of an old lead-toy box. This box held lead toys of a hospital ward and was brought in by a client who collects lead toys. His wife is the poster collector, but he brought it to us in the hopes that we would be able to stabilize this box. And as you can tell from the fact that we're doing another two part blog post, we can! The issues, as you can see from the pictures below, were that a whole section was missing from the box that included an interior flap as well as numerous tears all over the box. Clearly this little thing has had a rough life. Pictured: Back of the toy box.  Pictured: Front of the toy box.  Pictured: The box was falling apart, which made it much easier for us to get a picture of the inside. The section to the right with part of a crescent moon on it is what was missin

I always love writing the words "We're doing something different this week" on our blog. The variety of ephemera that we see on a daily basis is a huge perk to this job. So, bear with me as I get a little wordy, because we're doing something different this week! As our regular readers and clients know, Poster Mountain has been privileged to be part of the growing wave of contemporary silkscreens, both as collectors and conservators. We have been lucky enough to see a lot of these, although sadly its because they have been damaged in some way. Usually from issues during shipping.  Silkscreens are amazingly varied, but two things make them stand out in particular, at least for me, from other types of prints: the viscosity of the ink and the range of paper types they are being printed on. Even different posters from the same shop have vastly different responses to our conservation techniques because of these two aspects. In an effort to continue to expand our k