So you've made an awesome showprint for a band you love, hung them up all over town to get fools out to the show, and placed copies in the hands of the bands and the club owner, now what? How do you get rid of the rest of them in exchange for cash money?
I tried my best to remember the in process shots as I built a vacuform machine last week. I was less successful at documenting the process that I was at making the device. Here are some of those pictures and a play by play of the build.
My first exposure unit consisted of a sheet of glass on sawhorses and a 500watt halogen lamp underneath. 10 years later, my exposure unit consists of a sheet of glass on a table built of 2x4's with black lights underneath. They are remarkably similar in the structure. Long and short is you don't need a fancy exposure unit to burn your own screens and you really shouldn't pay someone else to do it unless you're pressed for time or space.
So Alicat and I took a trip to California for part of a west coast roadtrip that my parents were taking with my cousins. That's a bit of a mouthful, but long and short is that we got to check out LA for the first time. Living in Memphis it's a little difficult to see the big names in visual art, so we spent a day of the trip checking out the Tim Burton Show at LACMA, the Hammer Museum, and the huge graffiti show at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary Art Museum.
Dick Dale is one of the stranger acts that I've seen live. At the show where I first saw him in Madison, Wi., he actually started playing the guitar in the SUV that he arrived in. I don't mean he sat in the car and tuned up or noodled around, I mean he actually started playing the show inside the club while seated in the car via a wireless hook up to his amp. He walked in to the club through the front door, with the band already on stage and playing along to him. He made his way through the crowd playing an extravagant lead that referred to Miserlou, Pipeline, and Hawaii 5-0 all Junior Brown style.
Since I first heard Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears last year shortly before their gig at the Levitt Shell in Memphis, unfortunately a little too shortly before the show. This is BJL's first Memphis show since then and took the opportunity to make this print for June 23 at the Hi Tone.
3 Color Print on French Paper
Edition of 50 + 10 APs
I finally found something good for that purple paper, and it's BLUES EXPLOSION! Amazed that Jon Spencer was coming to our tiny little Hi Tone, I sent a text to the booker to see if it was for real. It was indeed, and I had a digital proof to the Hi Tone inside 8 hours. Busted this one out fast so mine would be the one in the window...
4 Colors on French Paper
Edition of 40 + 10 APs
So I guess Eroica Ensemble dug the posters...they've come back for another one. I'm not sure what they are doing with them - using them as merch or hanging them up, but it's always nice to get a commission, so either way is awesome by me.
2 Color Print on French Paper
Edition of 50 + 10 APs
Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan's Craig Brewer is making a docudrama webseries called $5 cover here in Memphis. I've seen the grip and lighting trucks and art department trucks parked outside of many locations throughout town and the excitement is plain.
The first screen print I tried to make was a showprint. I looked at the 'fine art' serigraphy that was being done both at my school and what I could find in the pre-internet research days, and found that I was much more energized by great gig posters for band's I'd never heard. So I set out to create the awesomest most complicated 6 or 8 color print including three 2 color split fountains to increase the number of colors on the page to a gazillion. I started with the university standard 15 sheets in my edition, but by the time I got to the third color I had misprinted so many that the edition had shrunk to less than 3. Lesson learned...don't run before you can walk.