Zettwoch's Suitcase: May 2011

The Vumpire

drawn 5/3/11. Redbirds lose to the Giants, 7-3.

Recent Leon Beyond Experiments

Assessing the Stickiest Situations

Assembling The Ultimate Branson Show!

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:

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.

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: