Zettwoch's Suitcase: May 2011

Monday, May 23, 2011

Best New Poets 2011

I believe this Wednesday (May 25) is the last day to submit poems to this year's Best New Poets anthology, of which I drew the cover (above). Here was my sketch and a couple other ideas:

Sunday, May 15, 2011

ARTCRANK / Pee-Wee Bike Print!

This was my contribution to the 2011 ARTCRANK poster show that just pedaled through St. Louis, 4-color (dark brown, red, yellow & silver) screenprint on Ivory Canson Edition paper, 24.5" x 18", edition of 30. Anyone who knows me knows that Pee-wee's Big Adventure is my favorite movie and I was excited to have a somewhat legitimate reason to make this print.

Here was my first sketch, made while closely watching the DVD and pausing every time Pee-Wee's bike was onscreen or a new feature was unveiled:

Here's some more screencaps and reference I collected in my research:

I started off with a straight side-view vector rendering of the bike, and worked on skewing it to the "lift-off" angle I wanted, as well as turning the handlebars/front wheel.

The can see I also figured out the palette swatches I wanted to use, based on these ink tests:

I printed out the vector bike and doodled roughly more on top of it:

And then doodled a bit more tightly:

And then, with the help of my lightbox, eventually made this ink drawing:

And then scanned everything and created the final digital art seen here:

Here's what the 4 seps. looked like. I make these just by using the 'select same fill color' function in Illustrator and turning the colors either black or white before lazer-printing the transparencies.

And here's a much better picture of the final thing from the official Flickr set of amazing ARTCRANK prints, taken by Brian Cummings and Monica Heitz of RGG Photography (www.rggphoto.com)©2011 ARTCRANK™:

I'm not sure how many prints are left from the original edition sold at the show, but I've still got these screens and inks in my basement so I make some more if anyone's interested. Drop me a line if so! Tell' em Large Marge sent ya.

Thanks to Charles Y. and everyone else involved with putting on a great, fun show! I'm excited to have been a part of it.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

ArtCrank Tonight!

I'm in this bike print show ARTCRANK that opens tonight at Atomic Cowboy. It should be fun and I'm excited to be a part of it. There are over 30 artists, all prints are in editions of 30 and for sale for $30 each. My poster is a 4-color screenprint; here's another hint at what it deals with: