Trees

Our December box was inspired by a two week trip to the Baltics. In Estonia and Finland we encountered all manner of novel colours, patterns, fabrics, and Lisa poured that inspiration into her design for the box. 

Among those inspirations were the Shepard Fairey retrospective at Fotografiska:

Nepali paper we found at Zelluloos:

The lushness at Marrimekko:

And the sights and lights of in Tallinn and Helsinki:

Lisa’s vision from the beginning involved trees, represented as simple triangles, each triangle rendered in a different colour and pattern. She started off sketching-in-ink with a prototype made from roughly carved stamps:

Collage was very much on our mind, in part because Fairey uses layers so interestingly, so Lisa next created a couple of full-fledged box prototypes by layering paper on paper, colour on colour:

While these were beautiful, and inspired us onward, the “fiddliness” of all that paper cutting and gluing and positioning was daunting, and we pivoted to thinking that we’d execute the same idea, but using lino block printing. Lisa came up with a sketch of a plan:

We then cut out a kind of “tree alphabet” of triangles of different squatness levels, thinking we’d mix and match these in different ways, positions, colours:

Lisa then carved designs into these “tree triangles,” and we set them in the chase for the letterpress:

We printed a solid cream-coloured underlayer on the boxes, and then printed trees in pink:

From there we added layers of colour. Gold was next:

Lisa carved new trees — and carved away parts of trees as we proceeded, to leave the colours under to shine through while we printed new colours:

The final step was to deboss a star into the front-facing panel of each box:

The final box is very much rooted in Lisa’s original prototypes, but also something completely different, more textured, subtle, complex: