Rhode Island Superlatives

My first foray into screenprinting. I wanted to list various superlatives I’ve heard about Rhode Island (like having the smallest national park, the most non-profit organizations per capita, and so on) and link to references that would verify or disprove the claims. The links are intended to be future-proof and show the current status of the claim as the world changes. Many of them point to Wikipedia, with some articles to which I added statistics and references.

Superlatives listed below:

1. Rhode Island is the only state to celebrate VJ Day – bit.ly/superri1
2. Pawtucket is the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution – bit.ly/superri2
3. The Westminster Arcade is the oldest enclosed shopping mall in the U.S. – bit.ly/superri3
4. Roger Williams National Memorial is the smallest U.S. national park – bit.ly/superri4
5. The RI State House is the third-largest unsupported dome in the world – bit.ly/superri5
6. Rhode Island has the most imbalanced state legislature – bit.ly/superri6
7. The “Big Blue Bug” is the world’s largest artificial bug – bit.ly/superri7
8. The Crawford Street Bridge was at one time the world’s widest bridge – bit.ly/superri8
9. The town of Bristol has the country’s longest running 4th of July parade – bit.ly/superri9
10. Rhode Island has the highest unemployment rate of any U.S. state – bit.ly/superri10
11. Rhode Island has longest official state name – bit.ly/superri11
12. Rhode Island has most non-profit organizations per capita – bit.ly/superri12
13. Rhode Island has highest ratio of coastline to land area of any U.S. state – bit.ly/superri13

As someone who is accustomed to working digitally, I found the process of screenprinting to be quite frustrating, at least the way I was going about it. I built the artwork first in Photoshop and then got it printed on acetate in preparation to burn the screens. Essentially, I was printing as an interim step to printing. And I learned that in order to get the detail to show through in the screens, I had to layer two copies of the artwork on acetate on top of each other. I had some issues with registration between the two layers since the acetate was curled and had to redo the steps a few times to get it right. If I ever screenprint again, I plan on doing more drawing directly on the acetate as opposed to laying things out digitally first. And maybe I’ll focus on one color.