Sarah and Emmett

I started Pressure Printing as a way to collaborate with and promote the artwork of the amazingly talented artists that I admire most. It is first and foremost a labor of love and secondly a vehicle to generate enough money to perpetuate itself and to hopefully make money for the artists and myself. I have been professionally involved in the graphic art world for over twenty years and have been block printing since I was a small child. My design business, Keech Studio, has worked with clients large and small since 1986. My passion for fine and unusual art combined with a need to print compelled me to start Pressure Printing with the goal of creating unique and sought-after handpressed print editions of the finest quality possible. Using antique handpresses, I individually print all of the images in these collections myself. The traditional process is a painstaking one that produces one impression at a time, resulting in a beautiful print with depth and dimension not achievable by any electronic method. The paper I use for the prints is carefully selected and is usually hand made especially for the projects. I design the packaging and advertising for the projects I work on as Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. Screen printing is also a stencil method of print making in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with an impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface. It is also known as silkscreen, seriography, and serigraph. Travis Louie’s paintings come from the tiny little drawings and many writings in his journals. He’s created his own imaginary world that is grounded in Victorian and Edwardian times. It is inhabited by human oddities, mythical beings, and otherworldly characters who appear to have had their formal portraits taken to mark their existence and place in society. The underlining thread that connects all these characters is the unusual circumstances that shape who they were and how they lived. Some of their origins are a complete mystery while others are hinted at. A man is cursed by a goat, a strange furry being is discovered sleeping in a hedge, an engine driver can’t seem to stop vibrating in his sleep, a man overcomes his phobia of spiders, etc, . . .Using inventive techniques of painting with acrylic washes and simple textures on smooth boards, he’s created portraits from an alternate universe that seemingly may or may not have existed.