This is a small print series I made between projects. The substrate is a pile of pages I tore out of a thrift-store paperback. The inks are gouache and screenprint. The lines are the kind of one-liner that sounds like it came from Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, or somebody at a 1940s dinner party who had been waiting all evening for the right opening.

Every page starts the same way. I tear a page out and paint a flat color block where the type wants to go, then let it dry and overprint the line in heavy condensed sans, set so big the original prose only shows around the edges.

The constraint is the page itself. Whatever the paperback gave me on that page is what I had to work with. A wide page got a big block, and a narrow page got a tighter line. Pages with chapter breaks at the top got the type pushed lower, and pages with a number in the corner kept that number in the corner. The found object did half the composition, and I did the rest.

The whole series exists because I wanted to spend an afternoon doing something physical that didn't need a brief, a stakeholder, or a deck. The process was just tear, paint, dry, overprint, and move on to the next page.

The whole series came from one paperback, a single secondhand book. I chose twenty pages, each one picked for its margins and the pacing of the prose underneath.

Each page gets one color, painted by hand with gouache, with no taping and no editing. Wherever the brush stopped, that was the edge of the block.

Every page uses one typographic vocabulary: the same heavy condensed sans, the same weight, the same spacing rules. The interest comes from variation in the substrate rather than the type.