feather2pixels

Here’s some work from the fourth meeting of the postcard workshop: (more…)

I am quickly approaching the end of my winter screenprinting workshops.  Tonight marked the third of four meetings of the postcard class in which, after much preparation, we finally got to printing.  Here are some of the pieces completed tonight.

Jason‘s heart (this is one of the best pen and ink rendered stencils I have seen–he got superb line quality)

Alison’s two-layer poem print on wood.  I was impressed how well the text worked here.  I am biased, but the print on wood looks great to me.

Grace’s greeting card.  Her two layers from hand drawings combined very effectively.  Simple and well executed.

Oh yeah, I also figured out how to make an animated gif with Photoshop.  Why I would want to make an animated gif is another story.  But for now it’s time to party like its 1994:

More items printed at the postcard workshop:

Jeni's print on guitar wood

Jeni's print on guitar wood

Jeni's print on guitar wood

Jason's postcard

Grace's greeting card

Guess who stopped by the screen printing studio the other night?  None other than nvSurly/Lonwell Alvier/Sir Lee himself.  The ever-dutiful Trent Reznor scholar since birth, Lonwell had just completed his new master Nine Inch Nails mix and the only thing standing in the way of shipping them off to the far corners of the California–Philly–New York City Corridor was packaging.

Enter the Slushmonger.

I would like to think that I helped motivate our hero towards completion of this much anticipated project, but just as the tides need not the assistance of man in washing up the ocean’s secrets so Lonwell needs no help from any one in making his voice heard.  I might say, though, that he did make this as difficult as possible, designing a multi-color square pattern that required the most precise of registrations–one false move and the spacing between red and black would read as monumentally screwed.

Alas, once again we discovered success together and everything turned out great.  Also, I must say that Mr. Reznor’s work on “The Social Network” soundtrack is exactly what I would expect from him in the year 2010, and I say that not to suggest that it sounds predictable but rather to offer it as the satisfying answer to the question of what would Nine Inch Nails sound like when Trent Reznor was fifty-one years old.  I have been enjoying it. (From what I could tell, the most important answer the film provides is that the social networking website is the most monumental thing to be invented by mankind since the the Polio vaccine).

Recently, some good people AIGA (the professional association for design) hired me to help throw a screen printing party at CELLspace.  The goal was to print 400 call for  entry posters for a design competition they are having.  So we burned a bunch of screens, set up five printing stations, and last Sunday a bunch of volunteers flooded the crafts loft with drying posters.  The whole thing worked pretty well and got me thinking of ways to transition the idea for my next birthday party.  Thanks to Kristen B. for being a great partner and and to Sarah  S. and Greer A. for the help pulling it all off.

Apparently my solution for balancing my teaching job is…more teaching? Well here are three new workshops I have enthusiastically committed myself to.  Not just that, but a whole new DNS domain I have enthusiastically committed myself to.   If I were still seeing my psychologist, she would suspect that this is all a way to push aside the hard job of making my own work.  But make no mistake, these workshops are going to be nothing short of awesome.  Screen printing makes the world a better place.

At any rate, I am posting about it before it happens instead of after.  So that’s progress, I guess.

Open Studios weekend has come and gone.  Aren’t you impressed with the power of my self promotion skills?  Well, don’t feel that bad if you didn’t know about it or weren’t there.   It was sort of a bad weekend for art.  My memory of it will forever take the form of me sitting alone in a 15,000 square foot warehouse, competing with the Blue Angels and Burning Man Decompression for the attention of San Francisco.  In other words, nothing is my fault ever.

On the positive side, the weekend was a welcome chance to hang up lots of work from the last year, create a bottomless wine and cheese plate and take stock of my practice.  I think it looked good.  It’s too bad you weren’t there, I was practically giving shit away.  If you look closely, you can see my t-shirt rack!

People seem to be much more interested in my studio when I am working on t-shirts.   So maybe out of the goodness of my heart or maybe out of a pitiful need to be noticed, I printed a few tops for friends and family.

My secret weapon: H&M.  How are they able to manufacture garments in Bangladesh, ship them eight thousand miles to the West Coast of the U.S., and sell them at profit for $5.95?  Just a little thing called supply side economics you dumbass liberal apologists.  You jerks are so in love with regulation that if you had your way this rampant federal government would probably be trying to take over the delivery of everyone’s goddamned mail (and taxing me for it).

Anyway the series depicts three figures selected the from the city’s history.  I already executed a second printing, mostly because I carelessly failed to buy any large shirts the first time.

It’s a series of, I don’t know, twenty? Anyone want one? If so, I will heat set and drop in the mysterious blue container outside. It seems to seems to receive, sort, handle, and promptly deliver anything I place in it.

Much as Spy Kids (2001) begot 2002’s Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, so the Silian Rail poster resulted in a spin off project that I will detail in this sequel to the previous post.  Following their tour, the band played a CD release show in San Francisco.   At this show I was connected with Lia Rose, whose inspiring success in funding her debut solo album on kickstarter.com afforded her the funds to print some t-shirts.  That’s where I came in, she suggested.  I don’t usually print t-shirts because (1) I don’t have the proper gear (2) There are plenty of other people who print t-shirts and (3) They are much better at it than I.  We decided to give it a try anyway and and to my surprise we were able to crank out 75 one layer t-shirts in just one long Wednesday night, including coffee break.  I worked the squeegee, Lia Rose worked the heat gun.

This was the goal:

Typically,  printing a light color on dark fabric is the screenprinter’s classic pain in the ass scenario.   There’s almost no ink that will look opaque and bright when printed light-on-dark alone.  Printing a light graphic on a dark shirt usually requires a base coat of white or an initial spot bleaching step to lighten the bit of shirt directly under the ink (i.e. discharge printing, which is like magic.  Check out this fantastic video demo for excruciating technical detail more info). Naturally,  I was pretty sure I would fuck up all of the above and waste poor Lia Rose’s hard earned venture capital.  Once again, I found myself toeing the line between mediocre and piss poor.

What was I going to do?

Luckily, the light-on-dark dilemma is only a dilemma if a bright and opaque graphic is desired.  You actually get a somewhat cool vintage-y look if you just say screw it and print with no conditioning.  So screw it we did, hard and long with excellent results.  It was an edition of 75 shirts, printed on Alternative Apparel with Matsui RC  ink, heat set at 320° for 60 seconds.  Mediocrity pays off again!  Here’s Lia Rose with a freshly heat set men’s medium.

And a close up of the feaf, a “feather-leaf hybrid.” I think they have them in Madagascar:

While I was away this summer I received an email that looked something like this:

Translation:  your workspace is gone.  This is just kind of how CELLspace works operates and that’s okay.  I took the opportunity to move my whole screen printing operation from the upstairs former craft loft to my downstairs studio .  Space is a lot tighter but if I open both doors and suck in my stomach it still works.  And I have really been enjoying coming to CELL during the long summer afternoons, working while the warehouse is sunny and artists are doing their thing.  Here is the new setup.

The principle printing for the 24th Street project is in the books.  Oh my god!  I didn’t think it was possible.  Yet tonight at 9:22 pm PST, the following took place:

[flv:final_print.flv 480 360]

That’s right: the final pull of the final piece.  If you thought that was boring, imagine setting up one hundred and four of those screens and watching the video seven hundred and sixteen times.   Okay so it wasn’t the biggest project in the world, but at least I can show up at my day job now.

Here are the last two prints: Potrero and Vermont.

This year I was in charge of organizing Cellspace open studios (to the extent that Cellspace can be organized). We had buttons, a cardboard stage, performance installations, and smoked Gouda. Some Korean students interviewed me on tape and I ate three burritos in 4o hours.  I screen printed a one layer poster for the occasion. Some other pictures:

Shows Shows Shows Shows!

Hello friends,

This Friday and Saturday my apartment will be hosting an art show that I am impersonally inviting you to. Yeah even you, IP address 58.191.987, the Nigerian hacker that provides my website with 400 hits per month. It’s free and you can stop by casually.

I wouldn’t normally bother you in such a manner, but this particular show is sponsored by Southern Exposure and is even an SF Weekly pick of the week. (And if you can’t trust your local corporate alternative weekly subsidiary for reliable event information in this world, who can you trust?)

The theme of the show is the concept of “home,” and it’s therefore being curated (by my friend Adrienne) in three Mission District homes, including mine. The work is divided by room in themes such as domesticity, migration, and mapping.

Anyway if you were to come, it would personally make me feel cool. And if you need a reason that doesn’t involve my ego: there will be lots of beer. Oh, it would be nice to see you too.

Here’s the postcard:

—

And on September 3rd,“Spacecraft,” our first Thursday series at CELLspace is happening from 6-9pm.

So after the screen printing area at Cellspace was ransacked by a former employee (once upon a time Cellspace had employees), I was given the opportunity to put my woodworking skills to the test.  The test in question was successfully building a new lightbox with which to expose screens, about a one half on the carpentry difficulty scale from one to ten, and I am ashamed to say that I could barely manage it.