Spray Mount

I don't blog about my freelance work as a general rule. I know for a fact that some of the people I've done work for consider this a major party foul, so I extend the same discretion across the board.

It's one of those things like always making your deadlines, even if it means pulling an all-nighter, it's just part of the gig.

So even though the latest taste of freelance work is something I'm actually excited about, excited beyond the payday part, I'm not telling who it's for or whatever, but I'll tell you it involved paste-up.



Back when the plains were black with buffalo, this is how a lot of my workday was spent: my trusty Exacto, steel ruler, a can of Spray Mount. Super 77 is too sticky, and glue sticks are too messy. Photo Mount too sticky, Re Mount isn't quite sticky enough. Display Mount is Super 77 in a different can as far as I can tell. Spray Mount was perfect because you could move stuff around if you had to, but it wouldn't fall off the art boards on the way to the printer.

Anyway, the present assignment was mocking up product, which meant Exacto-ing the labels out and mounting them on the bottles. Patience and a steady hand required. I hadn't realized how rusty my freehand cutting skills were until I tried to cut a smooth curve.

And to mount it? Naturally, Spray Mount was my first thought. But the guy who hired me for the gig said he'd had good luck with double-stick tape, which has the benefit of not filling your lungs with fumes. This turned out to be excellent advice.

First off, besides the fume factor, Spray Mount has a way of getting on and into everything within 100 yards of the can. And that's before you open the can and use it. Back in the day, everything in my studio was coated with a fine layer of adhesive and the dust that adhesive collected. My CD player, my chair, books I was reading, everything got tacky and then dirty. Everything. Including, no doubt, my lungs.



I still have a few possessions going back that far, stuff I had in the dingy little hole we called an office in my former life, an office that was declared urban blight and bulldozed not long after my then employer went tits up. And those few possessions are still coated in Spray Mount. The jewel cases of all the CDs I owned during the first Bush Presidency and the first Clinton term, for instance.

I was surprised at how well the double-stick tape worked. It got the job done, the bottles looked more or less properly labeled, though to my eye the flaws of hand craftsmanship are fundamentally different from the flaws of fast-moving machinery, and there was zero mess.

I wish the geniuses at 3M had invented double-stick tape back when I did paste-up work every day.