Screen Printing Prep (BF8)

Becoming a screen printer was an accident. I learned how as one among many skills during an introductory fibers class. I started out with stencils, printing on fabric. All I knew about paper screen printing was the difference in mesh count; regardless, I ended my days in the fibers department making excuses to print books, on paper.

I've always liked screen printing. I spent an entire holiday vacation scrapping together two screen printed gifts (one fabric, one paper), completing one step of the process at each home-state vacation-spot. I even got paid by some company, one time, to screen print bulk shirts at an event at the House of Blues. On my way home I passed a woman in a fancy dress lying on the sidewalk and vomiting. I learned the rest of my screen printing skills in Offset class.

An offset printer, just like a screen printing human, lays down one color at a time. It can print with any kind of ink: metallic, fluorescent, opaque, transparent, matte, glossy, etc. Unlike most screen printing humans, it easily handles a high volume of paper with maximum precision. Most contemporary books of color, especially professionally printed comics, are offset. Generally, these jobs are printed CMYK:  Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK being four standardized tones (or 'process' colors) that combine to depict a full spectrum of color.

The best way to combine process colors is to utilize halftones. Halftone dots are little spots of one color, organized in a grid, which are bigger or smaller depending on what percentages of that tone are needed in different areas of the image to make up the many-colored whole.

Taking advantage of CMYK yields a full spectrum of color, sure, but what if you only want to do three color layers? Or you want your print to look weird? Then, you can do what I do.

These are the color files for screen printing the Brain Frame 8 poster. From the left: the file for a dark magenta; a warm, goldenseal yellow; and a bright turquoise-cyan. Click on 'em to see all the itty-bitty halftone dots.

Very early in the BF poster process, I decide which 'spot' colors (any non-process color, which is to be combined in the manner of process colors) will be used for the final screen print. Simon Allen and I agreed that we needed rich tones for the sand and the water. Choosing a dark magenta as our third ink made sense for a few reasons: being the darkest color, it would effectively emphasize the line work (acting as a stand in for traditional black outlines) and, in combination with the blue and yellow, it would yield a near-full range of purples, oranges, and pinks.

Keeping our spot colors in mind, my collaborator and I then begin drawing all the different pieces of the image.

This is the original draft of the BF8 poster, penciled and inked by Simon (who took all the screen printing photos in this post) and myself. Very little of this draft remains in the finished image.

Each successive draft of the poster was drawn on thick transparent vellum. Simon inked the page above to give me cleaner, more precise character outlines. I ended up subtracting his drawings of the dunes, preferring to leave the divisions between sky, water, and land to the color fields from which they would be composed.

I asked Simon to pencil another transparency with shading. Unlike the BF5 poster, which otherwise bears a similar creation story, I wanted every object separate from the background to have organic dimension, instead of flat color fields for shadows. Because the contents of the objects would be printed in different colors than the outlines, I needed them on a separate sheet of paper.

The purpose of this page was not line work, but shape separation. Very few of the lines drawn above are in the finished piece. They exist, rather, to define the boundaries of sky, sand, wet sand, and water; and to more easily identify those areas occupied by foreground objects. Drawing these borders saved me from tracing the outline of every character and every piece of trash on the beach in Photoshop. Instead, I was able to quickly select these areas and save them on a separate layer. This freed me to draw the background without having to avoid all the stuff on top of it.

Another advantage to making all these transparencies is the ability to draw a certain part of the image over and over without having to erase it - you just pick which version you like best. On this page, obviously, I drew all of the background textures. You can see an early version of the clouds, which was rejected for the version on the following, and final, transparency:

You may also observe that I was vastly unsatisfied with my rendering of folds on the giant dead sea-raisin. I think there are four different pages with sea-raisin folds on them. I ended up compositing a few different versions in Photoshop.

Those squiggles are more sea-texture that I ended up not using. The blobbly shapes on the left are the shadows beneath larger objects on the beach, and the black wavy shapes at the top are the shadows which define the dunes.

After scanning in all of those transparencies, cleaning up the layers, isolating objects and choosing colors for everything; after figuring out what percentages of which spot colors are necessary to amalgamate the rainbow of hues I desire; after compiling those percentages into three greyscale files and converting them into halftone dots, resulting in the three B&W images near the top of this post: that's when I put the B&W files back together, replacing the black in each file with its respective spot color, to test my work. The image above looks different than the web version of the poster (visible here). That's because it is a digital mockup of the screen printed version of the poster. It's really worth looking at up close.

That's me and Andrew Ghrist. We are an unstoppable screen printing team. We are both fast, strong, obsessive, and neurotic, with painfully high standards.

I've only been screen printing in earnest, using this method, since Brain Frame 5, in March. That was seven months ago. In that time, I've screen printed seven posters: BF5, BF6, BF7, BF8, Go Down, Mr. Square, and CUFF. I'm better at mixing inks and pulling prints than I have ever been. With every new project, I succeed in simplifying my techniques without sacrificing an anal retentive attention to detail. I love screen printing for the precision and physical strength it requires, as well as the unavoidable imperfections which result.

Compiled

This is really exciting. I've been meaning to complete this compilation for two years, since I produced the cover for these comics in Offset class. This is really my first full size comic book, and most definitely the first thing I've been proud enough of and confident enough in to send off to publishers, for example, or drop at Quimby's. That's right, I finally have comics at Quimby's.

This book contains five comics and one prose piece. Four of the comics are available in full to read on my blog; the fifth comic is not online, will never be online, and yeah, if you want to read you have to get the book. The written story is the version of They Glistened that I read at Brain Frame 3.

You can see me talk about and flip through Compiled in the video above; here are some closer images of the cover design.

ELSEWHERE: My mother interviewed me about Tumblr! I didn't know she was going to put the audio online, I just thought she was using it to take notes. Oh well, I guess the sounds of me eating and knocking over things in the background aren't that noticeable.

Matchbook Business Cards

Back in offset printing class (these entries are just a post-graduation clearing house, aren't they?) I had some space left on the side of a print, so I thought I might as well make the most of it.

I had been wanting to make some business cards for myself. Predictably, the thought of just making regular business cards never occurred to me. Instead, I got excited about the possibilities of matchbooks.



I liked the thought of matchbooks with real matches in them. Because I didn't have the capacity to offset print that sandpaper strip that helps you light the paper matches in regular matchbooks, I had to use strike anywhere matches. For this version, I created a design with a stove on the front and a campfire on the back (two ways you can use the contents!) and 'STRIKE ANYWHERE' printed on the spine.

The reason I was able to fit these two pattens on the scrap edge of a larger print is because I made them very narrow (and, by virtue of the mechanics of matchbooks, the unfolded print is also very long). They are narrower than regular matchbooks, being 1" wide as opposed to the more standard 1.5".

The second pattern pushes the boundaries of matchbooks even further. I thought long and hard, trying to come up with another small, thin, disposable object that would be useful and pleasant to dispense in small portable batches. Toothpicks!



This toothpickbook unfolds to show a stretched out, weird face. The upper lip tucks into a reproduction of itself. The toothpicks are lightly glued to each other and then stapled inside, and easy enough to pull out one at a time (like the matches in the previous design).



I know they're decadent for business cards, but I'm also immensely pleased with them as mini art objects. The informative part of the card is stamped on the inside of the front flap. This stamp is one of those design-it-yourself types that come with lots of little rubber letters and symbols which you can then arrange to your liking. They're easy to buy at Staples or Office Depot, and not too expensive.

Motion Sickness (Redux)

I drew this a while ago. Last fall (2009) in Offset class I made some posters. It's a three color print, blue, green, and black. I particularly like how the blue mis-registers with the green in the vomit. It adds dimension.

They're really nice, around 14x17 inches, and on thick, sturdy paper - 'desert sand,' it's called, and is the same paper these were printed on.

Merry Christmas Bike Accident

It must have been a year since I made this run of high-class mini-zines. In my offset printing class, fall 2009, our first assignment was to make a one-color one-off project. I decided to use the opportunity to create a terrible Christmas card.

The last page shows me (this is a true story, about me!) sitting at a table with a bowl of lumpy something, stitches all over my face, eating through a large straw. One word bubble emanating from off-page asks, "is that straw big enough for you, sweetie?" while another, crossing tails with the first, says, "pass the turkey, please." At the bottom of the page is a large message: MERRY CHRISTMAS 2009.

As you can tell if you read the book, this is about the bike accident I had right before Christmas when I was eight years old. I skidded down a hill on my face and it really messed me up and totally ruined the holiday. There's still a chip of cement embedded in my nose. Gruesome closeup:

(Admittedly, slightly hyperbolic. Slightly.) I distributed this along with regular gifts to my friends and fellows last year. Because it was an offset project, I had to do a large run of prints, so I still have about 60ish copies left. I'm thinking of covering up the 2009 part and just giving them out as sick jokes, or selling them as sick jokes for other people to give out.