DESCRIPTION Brent Couchman Holiday Card DATE November - December 2009 DESIGN CREDITS Brent Couchman PRINT CREDITS Brent Couchman TYPE CREDITS Hand carved

QUANTITY PRODUCED 55 PRODUCTION COST $29 PRODUCTION TIME 1 month DIMENSIONS: WIDTH × HEIGHT × DEPTH 5 in × 7 in PRINT METHOD Rubber block printing PAPER STOCK Neenah Classic Crest Solar White NUMBER OF COLORS 2 spot inks, Speedball Red and Speedball Turquoise

Is a holiday card like all others? Surely not. Especially when each card is hand crafted with care and love as a designer seeks to learn something new, a technique that snatches him or her from their usual element, forcing them to improvise and go with the flow. Such is the case of Brent Couchman, designer and illustrator at Fossil:

For one of our projects we had done a series of woodcut inspired prints to use on different Fossil products. It was my first time working with the technique and it was fun to get away from the computer and learn something new. It was also relatively simple so I thought it could work well for our holiday cards. Previously, I had used a single color but I thought it would be fun to try printing with two colors. The actual carving was pretty easy and probably took about 2 hours. The trickiest part was to carve it so that each block would line up correctly for printing. I used the dining room as a production area and just printed an hour at a time for a few days until we had it all done.

The rubber doesn’t hold a great amount of detail which I learned early on while we were printing. Smaller lines, like the type, didnt seem to hold up as well as I had wanted but it also gave it an overall rougher feel which we were OK with. Based on suggestions from friends I think I’ll try using linocut blocks next time to get a little bit more detail in there.

We sure hope Brent continues experimenting and having fun. May we suggest a valentine?