Wednesday 17 March 2010

Yo Yo Bye Bye

Happy St. Patricks day all.

So yesterday, the Drew Millward and myself popped over to Mirfield to print our collaborative poster for Berkeley's alternative hip-pop group, Why?

Before all that though, we had to come up with a concept and then design the thing, which proved trickier than first imagined. So I asked Drew to throw together a 'geek' face in his crazy style and then I'd see what inspired me and work from there. After toying with the idea of having quite a text based poster, I decided to go with a geek-come-superhero approach (hence the cape clad action sketch). From there we kept adding bits and eventually building up a poster that resembled the classic Marvel comic covers from days of yore.

So without further ado, here is the printing process that we completed yesterday with the aid of Mars bars and cans of Coke in worryingly heavy consumption.

The acetates lined up ready to be burned onto the screens The first screen, burned and awaiting colour Mixing the first colour, which getting it spot on to our digital file always takes a while and generally brings out the perfectionist in me Action shot of Drew printing the first colour of the poster The first colour down The second screen burned and ready for print The orange layer down, which came through quite thin due to a slight over-estimation of Acrylic medium. This ended up give the poster's a washed out / authentic faded feel, which looked really cool. The final screen Done and done Here are some detail shots of the final printed poster Look out! The poster measures at 50cm x 68cm (which means its pretty huge) and will be on sale at the Brudenell Social Club tonight at the gig. They will also be available from Drew's site and my Big Cartel store as of tomorrow, so if you haven't got a ticket for tonight's sold out show then tomorrow all your dreams will come true.

Thanks as ever for reading and looking at the pretty pictures, hopefully that'll give an insight into all the time and effort that goes into the screen-printing process. As you can see it's a cool but long and tiring process and not one print comes out the same, making each and every poster totally original and individual.

I think after all that a well-deserved Guiness or 4 are in order for tonight. Believe.

4 comments:

Felix said...

Great print. Nice to see two men at work.. doesn't look quick or easy!

I think I actually prefer the colours of the acetate..!

Cameron Steward said...

Cheers dude. The acetates always look cool when they're lined up together but it's like being colourblind. You get the freshness with the actual print, though we could sell the acetate... edition of 1!

Joe said...

wow, really really nice. going to be spending my quids on this tonight.

so much money going to be blown on merch :( how much are these gonna be?

Sarah Abbott said...

looks so good