The artwork for our January issue cover was produced at Gráfica Fidalga in São Paulo, one of the city’s last remaining letterpress workshops. Here it is on press. Read on to find out how it was done

There’s a feature in our January issue (out 18 December) about São Paulo gallery Choque Cultural and its attempts to keep the tradition of letterpress Lambe-Lambe posters going by using Gráfica Fidalga to produce books and prints. We thought it would be interesting to ask the workshop to create the artwork for our cover. Choque’s Baixo Ribeiro designed a layout using text supplied by us. We also gave him an EPS of the logo which the guys at GF made a stencil from and then routed out of a piece of wood

The logo was then set along with GF’s unique woodblock type:

And the poster printed on GF’s Johannisberg press, dating from 1929, using the traditional lightweight Lambe-Lambe papers in yellow, white, cyan, pink and green

Here are (left to right) printers Cláudio, Carlinhos and Maurício, joined by Baixo Ribeiro (second from right) with one of the finished posters:

They sent a few over to us, we had one scanned and here’s how it appears on the cover:

Thank you to Felipe Lopez for all the photos and to Tristan Manco.

For prints by Choque Cultural artists, check out the UK website here

UPDATE: Check out this film shot at Grafica Fidalga by CISMA

Cisma’s Lambe-lambe 2004 from CISMA on Vimeo.