Over the past few months, I've been working on turning old machinery brochure artwork & emblems into prints. Each one involves some combination of colorizing, patching, screaming at Photoshop, upscaling, vectorizing, buying more hard drives, texturing, illustrating, or just building up different ideas from scratch.

 

Thought I'd share a few photos of some first prints I've done, along with a collection of my personal favorite designs. I've made around 500 so far.

 

I've started selling these recently and been glad to find out the interest I'd imagined there to be for this sort of work wasn't just in my imagination. (I'm unclear what this forum's feeling is around sharing those sorts of details, so I'll err on the side of... not, unless I hear otherwise.)

 

I hope you enjoy looking through them as much as I've enjoyed making them. It's been for me what it may be for you: a long, welcome stroll back through an unmatched era of optimism, design and craftsmanship.

 

— David

 

(If there's a different "home" for this sort of post, someone let me know. Didn't feel right posting in "Free For All" since not wholly unrelated to woodworking. )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 5, 20241 yr by David Walsh
Injected missing photos back in; seems to have worked.

That is a cool collections of images, David. is there a different size for each print?

Fred, hey – thanks. I've standardized on 12x18 prints to start – matte/satin finish on nice 80# stock. I can (and have) made much larger prints, but it's a different printing process... gets complicated and costly to manage. I'm able to make the 12x18's locally and really enjoyed the size once I had them in my hands.

 

I use the same stock for all the aspect ratios – there's just a bit more whitespace around the print depending on the format.

All I can say David is.

Amazing work. Love them all but especially any of the Delta imagines set in those "art deco" settings. Just plain cool.

Thanks for taking time to share here.

Awesome work!

Great post and I remember some of those images from somewhere.

Very nice work!

 

I think you could sell stickers of some of those very easily, and if you could hook up with a shop that can print on aluminum you could maybe even sell some replacement machine badges on OWWM or similar sites.

Depending on what they cost, I might like to have a couple...but choosing which "couple" will be very hard to do. They're all pretty cool.

Thanks for sharing.  There a few brands I have not heard of.   Danl

Thanks!  It took me back to the early 60's in high school drafting class (all the images look hand done).  Hard to remember back when every line was a chore.