Chapter 8: Dan at Work

The next day was a busy one for Dan. He got up on time, woke Anita, fed her, and drove her and LaShonda to school. Work on the labels, a quick lunch, more work on the labels, collected the girls, dinner, watched a video with Anita, storytime, sleepytime for her, and then work into the small hours to make up for what he missed the day before.

Over the next few days he finished the pointing, then steeped the plate to remove the paper, applied a paste of powdered charcoal and water to it, and wiped it off. The tiny depressions made by the point showed up, being filled with charcoal, and he took his burin and joined them up, crosshatching the darker areas. Finally he washed the plate and was ready to print. He put the plate in the press, covered it with ink, wiped it off, and laid a sheet of dampened paper on it. The ink stayed in the grooves made by the burin, and the force of the press transferred it to the paper. He hung the print on a line to dry, and repeated until he had 25 sheets drying. The next day, he cut them up with a crimping shears to give a zigzag edge to the labels. He packaged them up and sent them off with his invoice.

His next job was to design an album cover for a rock band. This was his fourth. The renewed popularity of vinyl records had breathed life into what had seemed to be a dying trade, and Dan was starting to get some reputation as a talented and reliable worker. The 12 inch square format allowed a more expansive work than a CD cover, and he could do it entirely on his Wacom tablet. He opened the file he had been sent of photos of the band, and clipped out the heads of the four members. Then he desaturated them to monochrome and enhanced the contrast so they had only solid blocks of black and white. He changed each so that the black parts were replaced by a color, and placed one at each of the four corners of the square design with their name underneath. The background he made by taking a public domain image of one of Louis Wain’s cat paintings, painted during his madness, and reducing it to a line drawing; then faded the lines to faint gray. The name of the band and album went in the middle in, appropriately, Engravers MT font. For the back of the sleeve, he used the same background. He inverted the pictures to negatives and put them in the corresponding places in the square; the name went underneath, but mirrored. The lyrics of the songs went in the remaining space. He sent it off, and they loved it.

Also he had been approached to do illustrations for a deluxe limited edition of T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday, the text to be done by a calligrapher, the whole printed on the finest paper and bound in leather. He had never seen the poem before and could not make much sense of it, but there were some beautiful images in it which called to him,

Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?

At the first turning of the third stair Was a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit And beyond the hawthorn blossom and the pasture scene The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green Enchanted the Maytime with an antique flute