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.