Poster Mountain

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 toget

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