In preparation for The Weekly Print to start next week, I made my first giveaway for the site, these pin-up shop calendars. Two colors, 4.75″ by 12″, and each one includes all 12 months of 2009! The blue dot in her hair is where I will punch a hole so it can be hung from any nail, hook, or tack you may already conveniently have in your wall.
While supplies last, these will be given away with any new print purchase or subscription over at The Weekly Print.
I thought I’d post a couple pages out of the old Moleskine today. I was drunk and watching Jason and the Argonauts while doing the linework on these two.
Did this at a restaurant yesterday afternoon while waiting for my food and looking out upon the horrible wintry slush of Portland. I really like the “Dirty Snow” lettering effect. The page wasn’t soaking up the dark gray ink I was using, so the letters just pooled until I got a napkin and slowly soaked up the liquid, leaving what you see on the page.
See that spot outlined in blue? That’s what happens when you get a little too close to the shirt with a heat gun while curing the ink. It’s actually much less noticeable in person than it is in the image, I had to make it stand out a bit more. Anyway, my mistake is your gain if you happen to wear a size XL shirt. First person to Paypal $5 (to cover shipping and the like) to bigtime@robopocalypse.com will get this shirt. To reiterate, it’s an army green XL.
For those of you not lucky enough to wear an XL, all other sizes and colors of the Whoa, Dang shirts are up for sale in my Etsy store. I recently listed the Hearts screenprint from last week on Etsy as well.
This design was one of the more popular ones when I had the t-shirt poll a month or so ago and I finally got time to print them up. Two color shirt printing without a press is simple when there’s almost no registration necessary! The white is discharge white (see video below) and the text is red on the black shirts and a kind of bright burnt orange on the army green shirts. I’m totally diggin’ on how these turned out. They’ll be up in the Etsy store this weekend sometime, but if you absolutely must have, email me, they’re available from small to 2X in both colors.
This is a short, time-lapse video of me curing the white discharge ink with a heat gun. You can see it starts out sort of gray, but as it reaches a certain temperature, an additive in the ink leeches the original black dye out of the shirt and re-dyes it white. It makes for really clean whites and a very soft shirt because it’s not a load of heavy ink sitting on top of the fabric. You can get liquid pigments to add to a neutral base discharge ink to dye a shirt any color you want, but all I have is white at the moment.
(Oh, and if anyone’s curious, the heat gun noise was boring so the music is a clip from a band I used to be in. We pretended to be cosmonauts and all of our songs were about space adventures!)
I’m gearing up for The Weekly Print to start in January, so I thought I’d give my printing table a good scrub down. Sure, it’s lost some of its character, but getting it back to nearly squeaky clean means I can just mess it all up again!
Also, if you’re unsure of what The Weekly Print is, check my previous post and find out, it’s pretty awesome.
Here’s just the side of the table that I print on. All of that collected imagery is a combination of spray tack, full bleed prints, and me forgetting to put paper down before pulling a print.
This post is a little long, but it’s about something pretty big and important to me.
Over three years ago, I made a personal challenge to get back in the habit of drawing something, anything, everyday; a challenge which led to a little site called Robot-A-Day. Well, I’m feeling like 2009 is the time for another challenge, so I give unto you, The Weekly Print! Basically, every week of 2009, I will create and screenprint a two or three color art print, and I’m going to let you all in on the process! Besides showing off the final prints, I will also be covering my printing process as well as my thoughts and experiences as a DIY screenprinter.
I realize what with the poor economy, and the holiday season draining everyone’s budgets, now is not the best time to bring this up, but until the first week of January, I’m offering a special pre-order subscription to The Weekly Print. For only $480 (or $40/month), I will send you every single print I make for the site, which if you’re doing the math is only $10 a print. I am also offering shorter-term subscriptions and will be selling prints individually.
I would also appreciate any word-spreading that you may be able to help me with. I would really like to make this site something special, and a place where other home printers can come to learn and share what they know as I share what I do. So if you know of, or are yourself, a fan of printmaking, please check out the site and tell others who might be interested. Even though the first print won’t be pulled for about two weeks, I’m going to start posting regularly next week.
And, so I feel like I’m not just selling something, here’s this…
I haven’t done a self portrait in a while, so I drew this last night while having coffee at my favorite bar, then colored it, obviously.
Last color down!
And that’s all she wrote. Thanks for watching, these will be for sale on Monday along with some other big news.
FIRSTLY, Radrobot.org’s Livejournal friend, creator of the image you see above, and Prime Minister of all the Internets, Benchilada, is having a “Big Shill” day. All of his friends can plug whatever it is they have for sale. It’d be a great thing to check out and maybe pick up a few more holiday gifts from some independent producers of fine goods. Go check out that, I can wait, but come back and see what I’ve been printing below.
Yup, it’s the “Hearts” image I posted a few days ago. It’ll be a three-color, 10″ by 11″ print, available for purchase next week. This is a picture of the first color (bright magenta) being exposed.
Second color (dark greenish gold) getting some sunlight.
And finally the third color (reddish black).
First color printed!
And the second! What, you can’t see very well? OK, how about a closeup…
That’s all I’ve got, the third color will be printed in about an hour and posted on Friday most likely.
I spent a much of my day in the printmaking sphere of things, so I took a late night trip to my studio and threw a little ink around, something I’m starting to enjoy again after some time off.
A “thing for a thing,” as they say, and a sort of rip-off… of my own work. Not quite done, still messing with the exact colors and the final will have some text on it. I’ll probably end up printing this as a larger print, and maybe a small run of screenprinted Valentine’s Day cards… anyone interested?
Also, if you are still looking for gifts for the upcoming holiday season, why not give the gift of supporting an independent artist? I just stocked my Etsy store with over 40 different items this weekend, some of which have never officially been listed for sale, such as pieces from my “Connected” show from last summer and my more recent “t-shirts with the big skull on them,” amongst many other cheap arts. Why don’t you take a look and see if there’s anything you’d like?