Return of the Revenants

Vistaprint were having one of their "50% off everything" flash sales on Monday this week (these are not infrequent but, I have to say, not as worryingly frequent as those of on-demand publisher Blurb), and this prompted me to think that – given my own printer can handle at most so-called "A3+" (48.3cm long) sheets – perhaps a straightforward way of producing the concertina-style booklets I was discussing in a previous post might be to have A2 or even A1 posters produced (59.4cm or 84.1 cm long) bearing multiple copies of a booklet, which could then be cut out as single strips.

I like having my work printed commercially, as I do with the calendars and cards. I suspect this is a result of having seen most of the art I absorbed in my formative years printed in books or on posters, rather than "live", as it were. To me, it always looks more convincing that way, and is also both more durable and rather less precious than, say, a beautiful but easily-damaged original pigment print on classy paper. It's a lot cheaper, too: done in moderate bulk, you're talking pence per item, not pounds.

So, I laid up an A2-sized image of three copies of my test title, This is Not a Drill, and uploaded it. The cheapest poster paper that Vistaprint do is 125gsm in weight, which is relatively light and should therefore fold quite nicely when scored, provided the "grain" of the paper is not too resistant. Vistaprint's print quality is usually pretty good, so even at full price this could be an economic way of producing something worthwhile. We'll see.

However, having done that, I found that I liked the visual impact of those three bars of images on a single sheet. It reminded me that, way back when I first started doing digital photography and cameras were only really capable of producing a 7" x 5" image at print resolution, I used to play around with arrays of multiple photographs, as a way of overcoming this limitation and produce something that could still be seen to advantage framed on a wall. In that retrospective cast of mind, I went back to one of the more successful efforts from that time, The Revenants (2007), and quickly bashed out another A2 sheet, this time as a work in its own right (above), a sort of "poster book". I finished it in time to catch the midnight deadline for the Vistaprint sale, and I'm curious to see what the printed result will look like.

I then remembered that one of my earliest self-published books, Pentagonal Pool (2006), is actually largely made up of such multiples (examples above). Revisiting it, I found I was still pleased by the quality of the work. That kind of repeated, serial imagery has become a bit of a cliché now, but 15 years ago it still had a bit of excitement about it, and something of that has persisted (due, I'd like to think, to the mastery with which it was carried out). So, even though the current Vistaprint sale has finished – there'll be another one along soon enough – I decided I'd opened a sufficiently interesting and fresh avenue of exploration to continue wandering down it.

Having started by simply stacking some Pentagonal Pool rows onto a blank A2-sized background, I spent a rainy Tuesday afternoon playing around – is there any other kind of afternoon, lately? – and ended up with the result you see below. I'm still quite pleased with it, and think it would look pretty good mounted in a sympathetic frame about 65cm x 50cm. Or even – given it would probably share the sad fate of most commercially-produced "posters" – blu-tacked to a wall.