Working in studio, I spend a lot of time listening to music and various podcasts. As a teenager I started listening to Adam Carolla when he was on Loveline in the 90s, and continue to listen today. He’s now a touring comedian, with a popular podcast. When the Fillmore Silver Spring booked him, I was more than happy to be tapped to make a poster for him.

It’s a three-color screenprint, the last being a black overlay. I had originally thought to make the black layer slightly transparent so to allow the face underneath barely visible. But a lot of ink extender and transparent base are needed to mix with the black, and when you use too much extender, you get cloudy blotches of dark and light… so I opted for the solid black.

The image with the wrestling mask in the set below was the first pass at this poster. Adam as a luchador. The client went for the second option instead but I thought it was fun enough to post here. Pardon my [rough] Spanish.

Or, this is what happens when a band gives me six weeks to make a poster. It gets complicated. The print involves three different printing methods including four-color web (newspaper) press, three silkscreen colors, and one woodcut relief color using commercial letterpress ink.

The newspaper version went up around town since it’s thin/temporary enough to be pasted, and souvenir versions went on heavier poster paper and brown drawing paper. I’ve wanted to print on newspaper for a while, but getting the poster to read clearly against a high-contrast background like the front page of the Washington Post would be tricky. Enter letterpress ink.

The text layer is cut from 3/8″ flat balsa wood. I transferred the image from a xerox sheet using a technique where wintergreen oil is dabbed onto the backwards-reading page, and the ink from the xerox is transferred to the wood block. I cleaned up the smudgy result with colored pencil and cut away the unlinked areas with an x-acto blade. Used red letterpress ink with a small amount of white added for opacity. Then pressed the paper against the inked-up wood block with a dry ink brayer and my fingers, for good measure.

Apart from being good folks, The Riverbreaks are damn good musicians. They bring the rock. Check em out on the 15th if you’re in town.

I was recently invited to give a day-long workshop at MICA in as part of Dave Plunkert’s class on design, posters, and printmaking. The workshop began with timed freeform drawing exercises, discussion and overview, and concluded with students pairing up to created a series of three posters based on briefs the students were given. Each of the briefs described a community event or initiative which required and on-the-street promotional component. The point of the workshop was to generate creative solutions for events that aren’t necessarily exciting events. Students were shown a variety of works along these lines as part of the discussion. I also gave a talk on Fire Studio to the greater design/printmaking departments (and public) at noon.

I was also lucky enough to meet Kyle Van Horn, who owns and runs Baltimore Print Studios with Kim Bentley. He showed me their fantastic space and vintage equipment (fully-functional and well cared for), including wood and metal type, presses, cutting machines, silkscreen vacuum table and washout sink. And then I wiped the drool away. They give workshops and rent studio time—and they have a set of 20 inch tall Gothic bold condensed numerals I plan on taking advantage of in 2012.

Thanks Dave, Brockett, MICA, and Kyle!

Three colors, about 14″ x 22″. Sourced layers from collected images and patterns in my image library. Trotted down to the library with a jar of pocket change and made a couple hundred copies, scanned them back in to make a mockup for the client, then and burned some screens.

Printed the layers as transparent as possible, going yellow > magenta > cyan. In printing the cyan layer, ran out of transparent base. Added golden acrylic gel medium as a substitute, which began to dry in the screen between prints. Eventually resolved by scrubbing out the screen and adding trans extender base and retarder base to the mix. Some screen clogging is visible to the left of “Moby” in the horizontal blue band.

I listened to quite a bit of Moby before starting. Layered, interesting, melodic… I see a rift between his music and much of his existing album and poster art. Dry, Helvetica-heavy, clinical. I kept the Helvetica in this print; put my own spin on his sound. Pardon the pun.

First poster commission for new venue, the Fillmore Silver Spring. Worked with the promoter for other shows at DAR, Verizon Center, Sixth and I, and others… looks like they’ve got some fun shows on the horizon. I’m glad to work with them, and don’t see them as competition to 9:30 or Black Cat.

This is a four-color job using layered black over yellow over magenta over cyan. I ended up using four different paper stocks including heavy bristol, cougar 100 lb cover, strathmore drawing paper, and newsprint. The first two are for souvenirs, the later two are for putting up as adverts. The tone of the poster is designed to match each of the co-headlining bands, but the choice of the roller skates takes from Tom Tom Club’s “who needs to think when your feet just go”. See their original video (pre-MTV!). The show is this coming Friday, prints will be avail the day after my Crafty Bastards booth.

Summer stuff. Made some screenprinted paper airplanes using the “monster skin” screens leftover from my papier maché monsters, taught a wheatpasting workshop through the marvelous folks at KCDC, finally finished and posted a full-size batch of DC voting rights posters (the half smoke), and doing something with that giant bear head, made a set of prints from my complete case of 6″ tall French Clarendon (it’s at Pyramid Atlantic, and everyone can use it), and conducted a series of seemingly pointless color experiments using oil, food coloring, and an improvised lightbox I found next to the dumpster outside my building.

New poster work is on the way, and I’m helping coordinate DC Design Week—keep an eye out for a collaborative DIY poster design event…

Having put together shows on music posters, I wanted to try something a different this time. But no less fun. I knew my artist, designer, and illustrator friends would be able to take a theme like monsters and run with it. Have fun with it. This is an exhibit of 23 artists’ work, comprising paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture, textiles, and printmaking.

Below are pictures from the opening. We Are Monsters is on exhibit through June 4 at Pleasant Plains Workshop, open Fridays 2–7pm, Saturdays 1–6pm, and by appointment. Additional directions can be found here.

In organizing a group show about monsters I knew I wanted something eye-catching for the front window. I had somewhat specific ideas about the thing in the window being colorful and 3D, and decided this would be my piece in the show.

I started by screenprinting different patterns and colors on newsprint which would form their skins, using dots, scales, and stripes. I researched methods of making life-sized papier maché figures and knew that I’d need an armature. I ended up using 1×2 pine stock, and designed the armatures/skeletons at 1/4″=1″ scale and measured out and labeled each “bone” for safety. Once screwed together, I stapled heavy paper to the armature and wrapping it around itself, and stapled it off. Used masking tape and newspaper to fill in the gaps. I also filled the torso and skull with balled-up newspaper for support. Wallpaper paste was used to adhere the color skins to the heavy paper.

The figures are in our storefront window at 2608 Georgia Ave until June 4, 2011.

It’s a “seven” color screenprint in three layers. The second layer is a split fountain (color fade) of five different inks. A plop of each color is dropped on the screen and mixed progressively with each squeegee pass. The challenge wasn’t so much mixing the five colors on the screen, but mixing each color so that it would have a similar amount of transparency over the dark background color, so that no color band stands out as too bold. It’s 13″x21″, printed on 80 lb. Cougar Opaque white.

Five colors on the poster stock version, I added a sixth color (solid white) on the newsprint versions. I knew the ink would soak and look dank and muddy on the flimsy newsprint without a backing white layer, hence the lighter tones in the sky appearing brighter than the surrounding paper tone. The rough texture of the newsprint is also responsible for the rough printing of the lighter tone in the bottom part of the poster. If more than one or two passes is applies to such thin paper it will warp and buckle badly in the screen. The sky is a photo transferred to a course CMYK halftone, minus the black layer. The bottom image is DC’s Malcolm X / Meridian Hill Park. Thanks to Kate Tallent + Kristina Bilonick for the process photos.

I’m working on the Riverbreak’s album art too, which will tentatively be released in time for this show. They’re a pleasure to work with and listen to. C’mon out to DC9 on the 3rd.