Art and Design by Ernie Wood

Touch Generations Test Press

Summer 2024 I was asked to do the art for the unofficial Touch Generations release’s test press jackets—it was a tremendous amount of work and planning, but the result was well worth it! I carved a gaggle of relief blocks that represented icons from each game that was on the release (and then carved some more because those ones were way too big), started planning layouts on my block printing press and in Illustrator, printed those various layouts over the course of a heatwave and Summer Games Done Quick, painted the other sides with a big icon (each jacket had its own unique icon set), and then did everything again but for shirts to go with them. The shirt part was especially brutal, not only because of how varying of a medium block printing is but because of the sheer number of stamps I had to place every single time. I reverse engineered a jig for the stamp placement on the shirts and had I not done that it would not have been possible.

One of the ways I was able to keep track of stamp placement.
One of the jacket layout combinations I did; all of them were different variations of this.
The 3-table workspace (I also put stuff on my bed, so maybe technically 4-table??)
An example of some of the different icon layouts.

As you can see, every shirt was different, so that paired with the unique sleeve differentiations made every one of these a true 1/1.