Screen Printing Workshop

A few weekends ago, Sean and Tonya Lee conducted their third screen printing demo with students at the Art Institute of Jacksonville. It was held at the school from 10am-4pm on a lovely Saturday. This particular session revolved around Andy Warhol and his portrait work. Each student sat in front of some harsh studio lights while another student photographed them. They were left to completely decide how their portrait would look. Some went straight-faced, some went crazy.

They brought their portraits into Photoshop, adjusted the brightness and contrast (and in some cases, the size of their eyes) and we burned the images onto screens. While the screens were burning (2 at a time) each student, using printouts of their portraits for reference, created stencils through which they hand-painted colors and patterns onto paper. This would make each print unique, much like Warhol’s portraits. Sean did a horrible job documenting the whole affair, but thankfully several of the students took plenty of photos. See below.

Gil Samson & Amy Ploss

Photo: Laura Evans

Gil and Amy are probably the coolest people you could ever meet. They have impeccable taste and style, and I (Sean) have been fortunate enough to become friends through mutual friends and events/drinking sessions. So when Varick approached me about screen printing the invites for their upcoming wedding, I jumped at the opportunity. Quick sidenote, Russel absolutely killed it on their website, right? Sheesh.

Anyway, these wedding invites wouldn’t be your regular ink on paper invites…why would they? The couple had the brilliant idea of transferring Varick’s beautiful design onto quaint little pieces of balsa wood. I’m game for a challenge, but this one seemed kind of ridiculous, especially with 6 colors. Nevertheless, over a period of 2-or-so weeks, Varick, Jenille and I spent several sleepless nights cranking 120 of these things out. Gil eloquently tells his version of the story here. The finished piece is pretty stunning and totally different than any wedding invite you’ll get for the rest of your life.

Below are a couple sneak peeks of the invites. Since most of the invitees haven’t received them yet, I’ll wait until later to show the rest.

Support the Movement

We made a shirt for Tim to wear to Jags training camp. Story here and here.

More on this soon…
D&P

Required Listening: Consolers of the Lonely

Well, Jack White is at it again. As you probably know, he’s formed yet another band: The Dead Weather. They really are fantastic, and we strongly recommend a listen. Upon listening to this newest effort, I couldn’t help but revisit Mr. White’s last “new band,” The Raconteurs.

They easily convinced me that they knew what they were doing at a pretty mindblowing performance at Bonnaroo a few years back, but I had never really spent the proper time with either of their albums. Their debut, Broken Boy Soldiers, was solid at best — but the sophomore effort, Consolers of the Lonely, truly floored me. I think that’s all there really is to say about it, so have a listen to 2 songs from the album. The rocking album opener, “Consoler of the Lonely,” and the lush and beautifully brilliant “Old Enough.”
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“Consoler of the Lonely”

“Old Enough”

This also gives us a great opportunity to throw in a little of our personal inspiration. Rob Jones has been working with Jack White for several years now, creating posters for damn near every one of his shows for every one of his bands. His style and limited color palette suit the Jack White aesthetic so beautifully. Have a look see at some of our favorite Raconteurs posters by Mr. Jones and check out his site to see the other wonderful posters.

D&P

Inspiration: Hatch Show Print

This video just about sums it up.

Anyone got a letterpress we can play with?
D&P

Test-tees

Our best good friends Tron & Grease over at Halftone Def Studios have done it once again. A new poster, you ask? Nay! For this time they bring it huge with a rad new t-shirt — for all us nerds that like dots and lines and screen printing.

Hop on over to their store and pick one up.
Only $20 +shipping for a super comfy (and refreshingly sturdy) new shirt! I love mine and you’ll love yours.

What are we up to? Oh nothing, just printing some INSANE wedding invites for some dear friends designed by the always awesome Mr. Varick Rosete. These are gunna be brutiful. We’ll show them in due time my friends…in due time. Sean will also be co-conducting another screen printing demo with Tonya Lee at the Art Institute of Jacksonville. We’ve also lined up a few AMAZING poster opportunities for the coming months. Big news big news!

Anyway, buy a shirt, kthxbai.

D&P

Elvis is up!

Remember those awesome Elvis Perkins posters we collaborated with Karen on that we told you about?

They’re up in our shop!
We’ve got 14 10 unique painting/prints for your purchasing pleasure.

Please and thank you!
xoxo
–D&P

Required Listening: Folksy Stevens’

Back atcha with another Required Listening. We’re keeping it on the softer side once again with a couple folksters who happen to share the last name of Stevens (sort of). We’ll come back strong next week to pick the tempo up a bit, but these 2 songs are simple acoustic beauties from artists whose catalogs you MUST investigate further.

First, Cat Stevens (err, Yusef Islam) brings us The Wind. Short and sweet.

Then we’ve got SufJan Stevens and the banjo accented, Romulus.

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In other news, Heather Gabel has those prints we talked about (and printed!) up in her shop. Buy ‘em up!

I promise, we’ll get back to showing you our pretty posters again real soon.
Fun stuff in the works.
D&P

Elvis Perkins in Dearland

In our most recent experiment we like to call “collaborating with Karen,” we enlisted the help of the mighty Ms. Kurycki to jam out some serious watercoloring. And we’ve got to say, she’s a trooper. Working through a growing sickness and coming off a week of partying in Portland, she killed it on 30 or so sheets of hearty 12″x18″ watercolor paper. We then printed some thick black ink over top of the whole thing, resulting in 30 unique “prints.” See below:

Elvis and his fantastic band Dearland were pretty amazing. While You Were Sleeping was hands down the highlight of the night. Beautiful, moving, powerful.

They had quite the spread of merch. Including a poster of their own. Yikes! At least the merch guy was relatively nice.

It was warm. Sweaty beers. Yum.

We’ve got a bunch of these left, so we’ll be putting them up in the store soon…since they’re all unique, we need to photograph each one. Keep an eye out.

Beards y’all

Our homie Sean (the bearded one), who founded that club for which we did a logo, is putting on an art show! Here’s the call for entries:

BEARDS AND BRUSHES
A Facial Hair Art Show

• Art must have a facial hair theme (Beards, Mustaches, Sideburns, etc.)
• Art is due by Saturday, August 29
• Drop-off at Bogda Gallery (1253 McDuff Ave. South)
• Show opens at Bogda on Saturday, September 5
• Visit JaxBeard for more info (yeah not yet)

So that’s it! Create!