Anchorless

In the morning I shall be Hamburg bound for Flatstock 23 and the great times that lie at the end of my 14 hour solo journey. So I've loaded up my iPod with all The Weakerthans albums and got a couple of new Bill Bryson books for company.

I will be taking a fair amount of posters ready for the hard sell plus some kooky little business card wallets as illustrated above and below. I'll surely come back with crazy pics a-plenty from the weeks proceedings and be talking in some code that us 'poster weiners' have concocted to further distance ourselves from the real world.

I'll also post the new Bowerbirds poster up on my return but until then, have a great week!

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

Guten Tag. So you may or may not know that next week I am off to Hamburg, DE where I will be exhibiting at the mighty FLATSTOCK on the Reeperbahn. If its half as good as last year it'll be the greatest thing ever as I get to hang out with some good old friends and hopefully make some new ones.

Whilst i'm over there i'm also contributing an art print to The Beatles (you may have heard of them) museum in Hamburg, Beatlemania.

Here is a quick process of the art print being made, starting with a sky blue colour for the first layer. The second colour down. The third colour, which although Elle described as a bit poo-y, is actually more Jamaican Ginger I think... Here I needed to make sure that the paint had an exact level of transparency so that the colour behind would be visible, creating extra detail and depth to the print. The fourth colour is a dark salmon and again having to make sure that the paint was transparent enough to show the colours which I was printing over. So, a bit more of a tricky one this and it took ages but they'll be up for sale shortly from my Big Cartel store but I can't wait to see these up in the museum!

Loads of updates to come next week and hopefully i'll have time to show you them before I sod off to Germany. Until then, auf wiedersehen!!

Idiot Heart

Along with the Magnolia Electric Co. posters that I printed for the Brudenell show (which apparently featured a man dancing in his underwear), I was also asked to screen-print my effort for Sunset Rubdown. I wanted to make a series of the two posters, giving people something to collect and basically something that looked pretty cool.

With this in mind I made a sketch based on the cowboy / horse illustration from the Magnolia poster. I wanted the image to relate to SR's recent album 'Dragonslayer' and so I drew some dude riding a dragon... genius! I then inked in the illustration using my tried and tested Pentel Pocket Brush. And then I went about doing all the fancy Photoshop things like adding colour and then making the separations ready for screen-printing. This time I added a moon as opposed to a sunset, as they've got a track called 'Silver Moons'. This also gave me the idea to actually print silver when it came to the screen-printing process. The acetate for the white layer of the print. Printing the white layer. The white layer down on the navy card, looking all nice. The acetate for the 'split (yes, another) fountain' layer. Printing the 'split'. The finshed poster on navy card. Detail on tan card. The finished poster on black card. So there you go, a little insight to the design and print process, phew!

Also worth a mention is that Tubelord's Rainboliatric project got blogged about on the Rock Sound website, where you can see a few of my efforts littered amongst the hilariously great artwork from other great UK illustrators! Way to go dudes!!

Lonesome Valley

I believe I promised to show you some 'funky-ass screen-prints' for some posters that I did for the Brudenell Social Club. Since I am a man of my word, here is the poster process for the Magnolia Electric Co. gig going down tomorrow night at the Brudenell.

The acetate for the white layer. Printing the white layer. White layer down. The white layer down on the two brown card variants. The acetate for the 'split-fountain' layer. Doing the splits (not literally). Testing out the split layer, to achieve an authentic looking sunset. It worked! Detail (plus look close enough and you can see the metallic gold sparkle in the top of the sunset). Not all the prints registered perfectly but I kinda like this, as it makes each print completely unique. The finished poster, on Ruby Red card. So another month, another process thread. Hope you enjoyed it again.

There will be a super-limited amount of these posters available at the gig tomorrow night from the merch stall and from Monday 7th September they will be available from my Big Cartel store. Hopefully you might want to buy one.

Tatty bye y'all!

A Simple Hypothetical

If you hadn't heard, one of the UK's finest bands Dartz have decided to call it a day. Obviously this is very sad news but to celebrate their marvelousity, they are playing a couple of fare-thee-well shows and this is my effort for the Middlesbrough date. I was happy to be involved in some shape as to their sending off due to the fact that I can't make the gigs (mega bummer). So, to Henry, Will, Phil and Nico, thanks for teaching me to dance.