I’ve just finished designing and printing a new line of letterpressed notecards featuring custom dog and cat portraits. I started with four of my favorite current designs– the chiuaua, greyhound, kitty, and cattle dog. The coolest part is that they can be customized to feature anyone’s custom pet portrait.

Letterpress is similar in theory to block printing– in both cases, the plate is inked and pressed to paper thus transferring the ink to the paper. When block printing the pressure usually comes from my arm and a wooden spoon. In letterpressing, a cast iron machine applies six thousand pounds of pressure to the paper and plate. That intense pressure gives you some cool textural effects by pressing the plate deep into the paper.

Meet Fungus: creative muse, destroyer of crane flies, producer of eye-watering gas. And my best buddy and most favorite dog.

This is one of my favorite sketches of him as a puppy, drawn shortly after he emerged from inside a bag of dog food. How he wormed his way into it I still don’t know, but he had a hard time getting out. He lay on the floor for hours, bloated, burping and farting and happy as… a dog in a bag of dog food, I guess.

Which contributes some important scientific data to the question– if they could, would dogs keep eating until they popped? I guess the conclusion to draw is: no. Well, maybe. Maybe.

Needless to say, he’s never gotten a chance to enter the forbidden dog food pleasure palace again.