PUEBLO, Colo. — Iggy Pop. Green Day. Descendents. NOFX. X. Squirrel Nut Zippers. Bruce Springsteen. Alabama Shakes. Avett Brothers. Tenacious D. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
“There's been a lot of bands over the years that are really cool to get to do something for,” said Mathias Valdez, owner and operator of Lastleaf Printing, listing just some of the legendary bands whose merchandise he has printed, designed or both over the past decade.
“The main part of Lastleaf is the printmaking,” Valdez told Rocky Mountain PBS inside his Pueblo studio. “We facilitate printing show posters for artists around the country and around the globe."
The posters are used to advertise upcoming concert dates and are sold by bands as merchandise on tour. Valdez also keeps a library of past print work and poster art at his shop for visitors to see.
Lastleaf Printing owner and operator Mathias Valdez
Valdez uses a semi-automatic ink press, Adobe products and an Epson printer to create layer separations, but “printing is mainly still an analog process, where I’m laying individual colors one at a time on each sheet of paper and building up a piece of artwork that way,” he explained. “A lot of the art that I print, whether it's mine or from other artists, is generally two to five colors. But we've done work for certain artists that are upwards of 15 or even 20 colors.”
After first becoming interested in printmaking and art in his teens, Valdez started Lastleaf Printing in 2009, opening a storefront location in Pueblo to officially print posters for bands near and far.
With wide-reaching clientele, Valdez said he is purposefully less reliant on the ebbs and flows of the local economy. Though he has received lots of community support over the years, he said the local economy is “not something that I've been able to depend on to keep this running.”
“I learned early on that I had to almost circumvent the local economy in order to make a business or an endeavor like this work,” Valdez explained. “It’s true that if our local economy was more supportive of arts and culture, that would make it a little bit easier.”
For several years, Valdez held on as the pandemic put a strain on his business. “I tend to work for bands and movies, and during that two-to-three-year stretch, there were no bands or movies,” he said. Today, he is back to shipping posters to clients around the world via UPS and FedEx, and sometimes hand-delivers them to regional venues like Red Rocks.
“It's been a struggle to make a living doing this,” Valdez acknowledged. What often keeps him going is the camaraderie graphic artists and printmakers share.
“It feels like a group of people around the country and around the world who all enjoy doing the same thing, and celebrate that with one another,” he said.
With posters and music as longtime interests, Valdez said he is surrounded by things he loves on a daily basis. “It's not necessarily a lucrative career path — at times, it’s more of a passion project," he said. “It's something I really gravitated towards and just really like to do.”
At the end of the day, Valdez said he's "incredibly lucky" to get to work for some of the people that he does. "I value it more than anything," he said. "Even though I still consider myself in the fringes of this world, it's very, very cool to pursue something like this and to make a living.”
“Growing up in Pueblo, it was a really small place, and there wasn’t much going on here,” Valdez said. “So to find this music and then later on in life to sort of be integrated into those things that I thought were so far away is a really cool thing.”
Kate Perdoni is Engagement Journalism Director at Rocky Mountain PBS and can be reached at kateperdoni@rmpbs.org.
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