Jane Austen Skateboard AKA The Darcy Deck
While looking for ideas as to what to make for the Jane Austen crafting exchange for the bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice I had with Miss Jessica my eye wandered to this skateboard deck I had had for many years. You might at this time be asking why I had a random skateboard deck just in my office, well, I'll tell you how that came about. A handful of years earlier when I had just started as the secretary of Madison College's Art Club the board thought it would be fun to have a screen printing workshop run by an acquaintance of the club's president. One of his specialties was doing skateboard decks and he offered to sell anyone who wanted one a deck at cost. I couldn't come up with a reason not to get a deck because there were so many interesting designs I saw people doing and I thought it would be fun. It became a fixture in my office that often fell on my foot, usually when I wasn't wearing shoes and as time moved on, more and more of an annoyance that was just taking up space. But then when the crafting exchange came about I knew that the time had comes to use this deck.
One of the first things I remember about Miss Jessica when I met her was that she was a skater. There was a time when I visited her in New York and she was getting back into it and I actually went shopping with her for a new helmet at this way trendy store in Times Square. Why it took this crafting exchange for me to connect my blank deck with a present for her is beyond me. Originally I had this idea of just having her favorite Austen quote done up in fancy hand-lettering that a friend and fellow Madison College student was doing for me but in the end, what with the squareness of the workable area, I decided to go for a more graphic old time advertisement approach similar to a design I had submitted to Madison's Frosty Dog Jog a few years earlier. I already had many of the icons I ended up using from doing The Jane Austen Centre brochure redesign for a class assignment. What I added was not just a story of Jane's life, but many of the recurring jokes that Miss Jessica and I over the years shared about Jane Austen and the various adaptations her work had spawned. This finished design has such jokes as Mr. Hurst's nickname being Fatty Fat Buckle. Seriously, just watch how he "sits" on a couch in the 1995 miniseries and you'll understand why. As for the "Dancing" and "British" you must shout the former when they say it on screen and the latter when a particularly British male dancer appears! The key is usually their teeth.
Originally I was going to do this all by wood burning, and even bought a nifty wood burning kit. The thing is I had never actually done any wood burning up to this point and I was on a tight deadline as I was seeing Miss Jessica in a few weeks and I really didn't have time to master it. Because, to say that my first attempt was dreadful is an understatement. I quickly saw there would be no way to maintain the thin lines and the delicacy of the type. What was interesting though is that the process for transferring the design onto the wood actually looked really good. You print an inversion of your design and then get it photocopied. The key is that it has to be a photocopy because it needs the static and the heat set on the paper which you will then transfer onto the board using the wood burning kit you have not bought in vain. And this looked really cool. Of course because of the wood burning snafu I had had to sand some sections and this distressing that resulted looked even cooler. Therefore I decided to just go with it, distressing some sections, emphasizing others. And yes, I did add gesso. Because, if you haven't guessed by now gesso is one of my most favorite things in the world and can literally be used for and on anything. After the gesso had dried I then sealed the deck and now it hangs proudly on Miss Jessica's wall, showcasing her love of Austen and her love of skateboarding. Two things that you'd think would cancel each other out but just make her that much cooler.
My friend Jess and I years ago started referring to each other by our Austen handles, aka Misses Jessica and Eliza. In the spring of 2013 I texted Miss Jessica wondering what she would like for her birthday and she had an idea. It just so happened that 2013 was the bicentenary of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. As you now know over a month into my 
Madison College has a wonderful selection of wood type and when pursuing the drawers I found these stunningly large "P's" and was only sad for about half a second that there wasn't three of them, Miss Jessica being one of the co-creators of P, P and P, which is the Pride and Prejudice Colin Firth miniseries watched while eating Pizza. But in all honesty P and P works better. Because this was a quick one-off and not class work, where I was actually doing only two prints, one for me and one for her, I did this during open lab time. I didn't even do a full lockup, I just used some magnets and the showcard press, which is basically a proofing press. Funnily enough I had to do this twice, because I'm not the best at spotting typos when they're backwards. There might have been two "S's" at the end of "Misses" because I was going crazy that day apparently. So, on my second attempt I think I nailed it.
I originally went for too strident a color, a kind of spring green, and went all out metallic gold the second time around, because if gold doesn't say big two hundredth birthday celebration, I don't know what does! For those who do letterpress you might notice that there is actually more texture to the print than just from the wood type. I shall now impart a trick my teacher Beth showed me which I absolutely adore. What I did is I first printed the piece on a heavily textured paper. You pull the paper off and instead of re-inking you print again on a crisp clean sheet of perfectly flat paper. The impression of the textured paper remains in the ink on the wood type and transfers onto the new paper. I use this technique a lot because it just adds something extra, also ironically the textured paper is some of the paper I've used for my Jane Austen series I've been talking about. So this was the first non-illustrative piece I did in tribute to Jane. This was also the first piece for the gift exchange between me and Miss Jessica. Don't worry, there's more to come on that front!
