Person

Ink, Paint and Gold Leaf

ID Ines Duarte

Twelve years of work in two trades that people keep telling me are the same trade. They are not, but they help each other. The book work pays for the slow mornings and the window work keeps my hand honest, because glass does not let you undo anything. What follows is a walk through the covers, the storefronts and the prints, with a little about how each one was actually made.

01 Books

Covers and interiors, mostly middle grade and young adult, for three publishers and a handful of authors who came to me directly. Everything starts as a thumbnail on paper and ends as gouache on hot press board.

The Wreck of the Marion Rose

A middle grade cover about a sunken dragger off Matinicus, painted in gouache with the title drawn by hand in a compressed grotesque.

The manuscript gave me a boat going down in fog, which is a hard thing to draw because fog eats every edge you have. I did nine thumbnails before I gave up on showing the boat at all and drew the water instead, with one rail and a coil of line breaking the surface. The publisher wanted the title big. I drew it compressed, tight, and let it sit low so the white of the fog carried the top two thirds of the cover. Painted in gouache on hot press, scanned in two passes because it was larger than my bed, and stitched. It went back for one change. The art director asked for the line to be yellow rather than white so it read at thumbnail size on a phone. She was right and I have used that note on every cover since.

Interiors and chapter heads

Twenty eight spot drawings and chapter heads for a book about a girl who works her uncle's lobster boat, drawn in brush and ink and printed one color.

Interiors are where the money is thin and the fun is thick. These were brush and ink, no pencil under them past a rough box for placement, because the printer was running them one color on uncoated stock and anything grey would have filled in. I kept a real trap and a real gauge on the desk the whole time. If you draw a lobster gauge wrong, exactly one reader in Maine will notice and she will write to the publisher, and she should.
02 Glass and storefronts

Windows, transoms and truck doors around Providence, Newport and the South Coast. Enamel, and gold leaf when the client wants the sign to outlive them.

Fish market transom, Broadway

Water gilded transom rebuilt from a 1961 photograph found in a shoebox behind the register, twenty three inch letters, backed up in black.

The family had the original painted the year the shop opened. Nobody had a drawing, but they had a photo, and the photo had enough of the glass in it that I could scale the letters off the door frame. Water gild on the inside face, backed up with black enamel, then cleared. It took a day and a half, most of which was gilding and waiting. The old man came upstairs twice to watch and did not say anything either time, which his daughter told me was a rave.

Bakery holiday windows

Six storefronts painted in eleven days every December for a bakery chain, all by hand, all washed off in January.

Temporary work in poster colors, painted on the outside so it comes off with a scraper and hot water. Six shops, eleven days, usually in weather that makes the paint go sticky. It is the least permanent thing I do and probably the most seen. I stopped resenting that around year three. A window that thirty thousand people walk past in a month is worth painting well even if it lives for six weeks.

A short public write up of how I price windows by the layout hour rather than the square foot, and why it stopped me losing money on complicated jobs.

🔗How I quote sign workduarteinkandbrush.com↗
03 The press in the back

A two color Riso and about four hundred pounds of paper. Small editions of my own work, and short runs for other members who need something better than a copy shop.

Bay fish chart, edition of 200

Twenty two species drawn from the fish market counter and printed two colors, the first thing I made purely because I wanted it on my own wall.

I drew these over a winter, going down to the market on Tuesday mornings when the boats came in and asking to borrow whatever was on ice. The scup took four tries. Fish go dull fast and the color you remember is never the color that was there. Printed teal and warm red, two passes, on Mohawk Superfine. About eleven copies in every hundred come out with a registration shift I am not willing to sell, and those go to the wall in the stairwell.

Short runs for other people

Zines, posters, membership cards and one funeral program, printed on the same machine for members and neighbors at cost plus paper.

The press sits idle more than it should, so I keep a rate for other people's short runs. Under three hundred copies, one or two colors, you bring the files or I fix them for you. It has printed a union local's newsletter, a boatyard's price list, an eight page zine about pigeons, and a program for a neighbor's father. That last one I did not charge for and would not have.