[image description: 7 photos of a combination letterpress and hand-drawn print of Zagreus from the g

[image description: 7 photos of a combination letterpress and hand-drawn print of Zagreus from the game Hades, and the formes of lead type used to print it. it’s a 5.375x10 inch piece, black pen drawing illustrating Zagreus sitting in a seat full of laurel leaves, one foot resting on a decorative skull and the other dipping in the blood pool. The frame above his head has his name between floral wreaths, and wraps around a water jar pouring blood into the pool as the left-hand frame of the illustration. The letterpress elements are his name, the red of the pool, and a red & gold of his armbands and outer garment, rendered in geometric and floral patterns. individual photo IDs under the cut.]

part of a set of Hades prints i donated to Desert Bus 2021, which are scheduled for giveaway in the noon-6 pm slot Thursday the 18th!

i tell you what i looked at the environmental details around the blood pool exactly once and said okay, this is the floral pattern we’re using, and that’s the water jug frame we’re putting around his name, and everything else just has to fit somewhere in between those two things. and then at some point i also said sure, that seems like a fine amount of laurel to commit to drawing. GOD laurel is a boring plant to draw a bunch of times. but ok ok ok the texture was Worth It.

really maxed out the coverage i have of these flowers!! it does not help that i have an uneven amount of left- and right-facing pieces, so keeping the pattern sufficiently random when i had to use every piece and couldn’t be picky about how many right-facing pieces there are was, fussy. still! i love putting together a mix n match bunch of 6 pt. florals to augment this set, and i wanted to hold up Zag’s relatively small cloth object with something extra, another color.

name set in Delphin II.

more wip:Thanatos:Megaera

1: a photo of the complete print, where Zagreus lounges in a seat full of laurel leaves. he’s sitting above the blood pool where he revives after each run, with one foot resting on a skull and the other dipping into the pool. His foot, always on fire, heats the blood until it steams around his ankle. above his head there’s a frame around his name, bordered in a wave pattern. At one end the wave border transitions into the decoration around a water jug, tipped over and spilling more blood down the left side into the pool. The ripples of the pool and the steam are printed letterpress with radomized decorative borders, mostly lines, some wavy, some extra thick, a few helix-patterned. Zagreus’ red armbands and outer garment are printed in a pattern of red, twisting flowers, with a scattering of more small flowers picked out in gold.

2-4: closeups of the finished print, focusing on things like the jug & border arrangement, the shape of the steam around his ankle, and the red & gold pattern of his clothing.

5-7: photos of the handset formes used to print all the color elements of the print. There are separate formes each for his name, the red pass of flowers, and the scattered gold flowers. these formes need to be lifted up, carried, and held vertically in the bed of the clamshell press, so all negative space around the individual letters and decorative pieces are filled with shorter pieces, too low to ink or print. then pressure is applied by wedges to two sides of the forme, inside a rectangular cast iron frame, so that the whole frame and all the assembled pieces inside it can be lifted up. for the red and gold floral formes, the positions of each flower had to match exactly, so that the red flowers left room for the gold, and the gold dropped into place in the gaps between red flowers.