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I like to affectionately call this print “SharkBike.” I showed a preview of this during my screenprinting process post last week, so now that I am finished with the actual printing, here it is! Each one is 9″ by 18″ and is a three color screenprint. It will be exhibited in the Artcrank Portland Poster Show, which is being held this First Thursday at the Ace Hotel in Portland, Oregon. There are 30 other artists in the show, and each one has created a bike-themed poster using some method of traditional printmaking.

Each poster in the show will be for sale for $30, with $5 from each sale going to Bikes To Rwanda. If you’re in the Portland area, this will be a very good show to get to on First Thursday tomorrow. If you don’t know, the Ace Hotel is located at 1022 SW Stark St. See you there!

I will also have some of the edition to sell here shortly, hopefully by Friday, if anyone is interested in one.

No Typo Friday today, as I am on my way to the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland. I won’t be back in Portland until Monday night, so I will be back posting on Wednesday. See you then!

An illustration for the Portland Mercury featuring Portland politicians and community leaders who have recently sided against building another hotel near Portland’s convention center.

ALSO:
If you’re coming to the Small Press Expo this weekend, don’t forget to stop by and say hello. I’ll be sharing table C4 with the wonderful L. Nichols. Where’s C4? Well it’s right there below…

Earlier this year, around the time I decided to stop my Weekly Print site, I was preparing to cover my screenprinting pre-press method but never got a chance to. It’s a factor of my print process that I’ve wanted to share ever since, so how about today? The print is for the upcoming Artcrank PDX poster show, a bicycle-themed poster show.

Most of my prints, and other pieces, start as really quick thumbnails. I just had this concept of a SharkBike in my head with which to build. I’m also throwing around some ideas for what I wanted the lettering to say; I was trying to find some combination of sharks and bikes that seemed to make sense. I’m also starting to throw around color combo ideas.

A sketchbook is not always available when inspiration strikes, so I had to write this idea down on my internet bill envelope, which really confused my roommate when she found it on the kitchen table.

“Don’t” turned into “Never,” which I thought sounded a bit more dynamic. Also wrote down some more color ideas and final dimensions, as well as things like whether or not I should use halftones or a splattered effect in certain parts of the print.

This is the scan of my linework, actually slightly smaller than the poster itself. As you can see, I decided to draw a full front wheel, instead of looking more like a gaping shark’s mouth like I drew in the sketches. I penciled it like that, but decided the full wheel looked better.

I did in fact use a homemade ink splatter technique, scanned in, and turned into water splashing around the SharkBike.

Here’s my working file for the print. Usually, in a working file, I try to use as many layers as I need, so I can take out and add visual elements easily. This one is pretty simple though.

When I’m happy with the working file, I save a copy as my final print copy and start combining all the many layers of the working file down to only one layer per color in the final print, in this case three. I could probably go WAY in depth into this step of the process, but it’s one of those things that I’ve done so many times now that it’s second nature and I didn’t think to record the process as I was going.

The red and blue layers have a black color overlay (turned off for the image). I print out each layer separately, with the black overlay turned on, onto transparencies to use as my positives with which to expose my screen.

Final print later this week!

It’s Typo Friday again! I try to read just about any book I can find about hand lettering or sign painting, so I want to use some Typo Fridays to review them, so others who may be curious can know what’s out there.

The Art & Craft of Sign-writing was written by William Sutherland in 1889. I have a reprint of it from 1989. There are a few good books out in the world about the business of running a sign-painting business, and I’m sure this was certainly one of the only one from its era, but I would probably recommend reading some of the more modern books first, unless you have an unyielding interest in Victorian-era lettering and decoration.

The book covers a lot of ground: from how to set up a board to be painted on, mixing your own colored paint from pigment and boiled linseed oil, gold and other metal leafing techniques, to etching and embossing glass, as well as how to combine said techniques to pleasing effect. One of my favorite parts of the book is a small paragraph aside from the regular text, describing the multi-step process of how to paint a usable chalkboard for a school.

Many of the paint and varnish ingredients are still readily available: linseed oil, copal drier, etc, but some ingredients I feel may have fallen out of use or changed names over the years. It recommends taking a visit to your local pipe maker (tobacco pipes, not household pipes) and buying pipe clay. I assume a local pipe maker was much easier to find in London in 1889 than it would be today.

This book would be a fun experiment for anyone wishing to try out sign-painting the old way and is certainly a wonderful historical document for those interested in the subject. It can be found fairly cheaply on Amazon.

The last half of the book are these color plates showing examples of various alphabets or 3-D lettering techniques that you may want to use, as well as oft-used crests for various organizations, and other examples of Victorian decoration to mix in with your lettering.

An illustration for the Portland Mercury, which will probably be completely meaningless to anyone outside of Portland. That’s Portland mayor, Sam Adams, and city commissioner, Nick Fish. Two years ago, Portland enacted the “Sit/Lie Ordinance,” basically to target the homeless population. The law said that it was illegal to sit or lie on the sidewalk or street, maybe just in the downtown area, I can’t remember. Anyways, they are finally repealing the ordinance, so why not have a picnic?

Four years ago today, I arrived in Portland, and I have not wanted to live anywhere else since. Thanks, Portland, you’re pretty rad! I know the concept of writing “Stumptown” as wood has been done to death, but I’ve never done it, so there you go. For those of you who don’t know, when Portland was an emerging boomtown, they were chopping down trees so fast for lumber that they didn’t bother to take the stumps out of the middle of the streets, hence the nickname.

Also, here’s a tarted-up quick drawing of Ben Franklin as a test for a project that’s in the works.

For this, the second Typo Friday, I thought I’d talk a little bit about inspiration. Letters are everywhere, of course, so I’d have to say my number one source of inspiration is just walking around my town: look at signs, look at graffiti, look at menus, just plain be observant; there’s some really beautiful stuff out there. For instance, I was in class on Wednesday night, and my teacher was writing on the chalkboard when I noticed he wrote his capital A like this…

… and I was entranced, I kind of zoned out what he was saying and just copied that A over and over into the margin of my notebook; it’s really lovely.

But you’re saying, “BT, what if I never leave the house, what then?” Well, I’ve got that covered too! Here are a list of some great typography related websites that I frequent:

First off, Nate Williams, illustrator, letterer, and creator of IllustrationMundo, has just launched a new site that I am super excited about. It’s called Letter Playground, and you can join up and submit your own letterforms, search by letter, see random letters, and otherwise just revel in the beauty and variety of letters. The site isn’t even officially launched as far as I know (as of writing this post last night, there were like 30 letters submitted, eight of which were mine), but if you’re a lettering nerd like I am, you can join early and start submitting! OK, just lists, not too many descriptions from now on…

Letter Playground
I Love Typography
We Love Typography (same people as ILT, different style of site)
The Hand-Lettering Forum
Typedia

There are a bunch of great Flickr groups relating to typography as well, here are some:
Typography and Lettering
Hand Drawn Type
Handlettering
I (heart) Typography
Typography*
Found Typography
The Center For Vernacular Typography

Finally, these last two are Flickr groups about gold leafing, but it’s almost all gold leaf lettering.
Gold Leaf and Gilding
Gilty Pleasure

Obviously, there are countless other sites as well as specific artists who specialize in wonderful typography, but that would be far too much to cover in one post. If you know of any other typography or hand-lettering sites that I did not mention here, please do not be afraid to add some to the comments!

Everything illustration-y I’m working on right now is either in the early, thumbnail stage or under a NDA, so here are a smattering of the doodles and lettering I’ve done during classes or at other random times this week.

Plus, here is a very new review of one of my first comics, Business Casual, written by Ashcan Magazine. The last few remaining copies of Business Casual are still for sale in the store.

I did a lot of housecleaning this weekend, and while doing so I stumbled across a tube of paintings from a painting class I took last semester. I stuffed everything into my locker as each week progressed, and I don’t think I even took any pictures as I was working on them; it’s like some strange forgotten time. Anyways, I finally snapped some photos of some of my favorites; like this elephant, from the most whimsical assignment of the class, “paint any animal from memory.”

For another assignment, the teacher gave each of us an artist she felt we had some similarity to, and hopefully one of whom we had not heard. I was given Philip Guston. I had not heard of Guston before, but had seen some of his work, with mixed feelings. I had a blast doing this self-portrait of my knuckle tattoos in his style though.

I had so much fun, in fact, that when our last assignment was to re-do a previous assignment, I decided to do another Guston-esque self portrait.

This is my favorite piece of the class; we were to paint our birth certificate, whatever that may mean to us. I chose to illustrate my rebirth: an incident with a heavily self-medicated homeless man in an alleyway many many years ago that earned me the nickname of Bigtime. I love little fetus BT floating up there.