Tour de Lead Graffiti 2012 portfolio
This portfolio of 23 prints is printed slowly & patiently via
letterpress. Events from the opening day Prologue, stages 1 through 20, and the two rest days of the 2012 Tour de France are translated into a poster through handset wood & metal type and printed the same day.
Covering 3,488 km, the Tour ran from 30 June - 22 July, 2012, and was won by Bradley Wiggins / Sky Procycling from Great Britain.
This is one of the most enjoyable projects we've ever worked on and we'd love to have you support it.
Poster size: 14.75" x 22.5"
Stock: Somerset Textured White 300 gsm
Edition: 26 lettered sets, each in a custom, handmade clamshell box covered with a special edition of Lead Graffiti paste paper sheets.
Production: printed via letterpress from handset wood & metal type. The signature block is printed from a photopolymer plate.
. . .
S H I P P I N G
For each clamshell order, you must add a shipping option to your shopping cart. Either click this link or use the shipping link in the navigation bar at the top.
If your country is not shown, you'll need to get in touch with us to make arrangements.
. . .
D E S C R I P T I O N
Clamshell portfolio: 23 prints as described, plus a title sheet; a
descriptive sheet with a summary of each day's story
contributing to the content and look of each poster; and a
colophon sheet describing the process, materials, and contributors. The posters are
housed in a sturdy clamshell box, designed, produced and covered in
paste paper specially made for the project by Lead Graffiti.
We would gather to watch the day's stage of the 2012 Tour de France each morning "live on TV," discuss memorable incidents or moments and design options over lunch, and then head to the studio to translate our ideas into a poster. Each workday averaged just over 15 hours a day, including scanning the previous day's poster, making various sized digital images for our website, Facebook, etc., and printing via letterpress. Each poster was generated spontaneously on the bed of our Vandercook Universal III, without sketches or pre-planned ideas except those generated while watching the stage. Averaging about 5 runs a day, we would often print the first run without any notion of what the second run would be.
On eleven days we had guests in the studio, some who had paid to
share the experience and others who were just invited, to help
develop the ideas and contribute to the production. Each print is
signed by that day's contributors. Buy the portfolio and you have an invite for yourself and a friend to join us during the 2013 Tour de France to help produce one of those posters (each of you will get three of that day's copies).
While composites last, the portfolio is also available with a composite overprinted with all 108 of the print runs from the 21 stages and 2 rest days.
. . .
Click here to see a listing of the individual prints or or click here to see the composite print.