This has probably been my best freelance project to date. Jamie got in contact with me after seeing my Aged Beef invite. She wanted something interesting and fun for the thank you notes for her baby shower. This was a fun and memorable project for me for a lot of uninteresting reasons, but the deal sealer on this project was the print budget. Letterpress y’all. Joel over at Dependable Letterpress did a real bang up job.

Jamie and Joe’s babes are referred to as “Green Beans” due to their surname and their affinity for organic produce. The idea was to combine the style of those old signs while maintaining some fun handmade details.

I started with a really rough sketch that Jamie and Joe picked out from handful of choices.

Then I sketched it out, and cut up an eff load of colored paper—excuse me—African American paper. I lit it and took a bunch of pics.

After deciding I was not feeling a four-color offset job for this, I decided to do a simple two-color print, but this meant some tracing.

I picked out some loose color ideas, and Jamie punched it up a bit in her final choices.

This shit was the bomb. I hope I can do more projects like these as I get better. This got printed a little later than what I wanted. Lesson to learn there is to plan out the project ahead of time, and okay the schedule with the client. Her birth announcements (babies are due in October) should go smoother. I am honored to be a part of welcoming those babies into the this god forsaken world.