feather2pixels

Another year, another homemade Little Opera logo.

This one features some lovely lettering by Erin, pieced together from a fifteen page cursive drill we executed at Taqueria Vallarta.  Incidentally on our first date ever her and I shared a no sour cream no salsa regular nachos at Taqueria Vallarta. Yes, that’s pretty much just chips and beans.  Some cheese, too.

Our newest neighbor is this pop-up restaurant taking residence in the Italian place downstairs on Monday and Tuesday nights. In the last month or two, I have been doing a bunch of graphics and signage work for the enthusiastic chef-owners Tony and Jonathan because I want to stuff my face with their delicious food for free in a neighborly spirit of collaboration and mutual benefit.

The logo stuff is hard for me. I suck at Adobe Illustrator and my sole success in this arena is soon to be obsolete. But I enjoy the challenge so I gave it the old grad school try. Jonathan and Tony wanted something typewritery with a snail–eerily reminiscent of the tried and true feather2pixel regalia.  The final ingredient was some Bernal imagery.  I was a little concerned about churning out a cliche but in the end I got to use not one but two of my beloved typing machines along with a silhouette of San Francisco’s most overlooked radio tower.

My first official physical creation was this screenprinted sandwich board, to be replaced this Fall when the HSC pop-up locks-up its stock-up by taking over all nights with a suitably permanent sign to talk-up.

I found an exciting new place to display my work.  Coyote Counter Collective is what we in the industry call a re-tail space and those who have ever seen a coyote know that motherfucker has one serious tail.  Upon reflection I guess it’s a little hard to imagine a coyote ever needing to re-tail so I am not exactly sure if we quite have that right yet.  Or perhaps that’s the Counter part.

Anyway it’s a co-op storefront in Oak-land, where the trees are green but the Occupiers are not,  and my first official duty as a member was to screenprint a fistful of signs for some to-be-determined guerrilla advertising.  They came out well I think–a rehash of my go-to sign in one afternoon design–featuring glyphs from my beloved Remington 333 (eternal thanks for that, Kristin Roeder):

And here’s what my inaugural hanging looks like in situ.

Another year, another Silian Rail Poster.  In a good way of course.  I very much enjoy working with Eric and Robin who both share the highly fortunate personality trait of trusting their artistic collaborators.  I think this comes across in their music as a sort of highly complex  but refined sense of balance.   Even their sense of gender is equal in a way most music isn’t and not just the even number of boys (1) and girls (1), but something more along the lines of a harmonious male and female presence.

Anyway I am back into halftones, with some serious questions to be answered.  So this’ll help me.

The original mock up:

Printed layer 1: CYAN

Well I spent some joyful time printing, hand-binding, and editioning a catalog for my latest series of prints on trash.

Then I spent some more, less fun time distributing and photographing the catalog.

Then I spent some possibly-wasted time programming my website to show you the catalog here.

Little Opera is definitely one of San Francisco’s top fifteen, possibly only, all-kids’ opera company.

After an initial round of tee-shirt fabrication for the kids, Little Opera founder and feather2pixel sex contractor EB worked with me to print something more suitable for adults.  Since the kids’ shirts, as you will recall, featured an intriguing but possibly altogether inappropriate obscure nineteenth century composer, we figured there wouldn’t be much to change.

The kids shirts featured a dark print on a light shirt:

The adult shirts were printed with a negative image for the slightly more advanced light print on a dark shirt.  Getting a suitably opaque light print on a dark surface is a notoriously unfun screen printing technique to execute.  Conversely, deliberately executing light on dark poorly may result in this pleasingly nuanced monochromatic effect:

Cool, huh?  Amazing that it’s just white ink with a little medium for transparency and sparkle for attitude.  To me it says “I give to charity but I don’t take shit from anyone.”

Here’s negative and positive stencils:

And finally, here is the staged joy of screenprinting:

Everyone likes tee-shirts, most people like cute kids singing, and a small number of folks like opera.  That accumulates to a fairly good reason to make tee-shirts for Little Opera, San Francisco’s newest all-kids opera company.

In discussing the design with Little Opera CEO and supreme empress Erin Bregman, we decided each year’s shirt would feature a figure from the sordid history of Opera. This inaugural year’s mascot, Engelbert Humperdinck, was selected mostly on the strength of his mustachioed headshot on Wikipedia.

Tonight we made a dark print on light shirts for kids. Stay tuned for the exciting follow up I think I will call light print on dark shirts for adults.

You will note the exquisite detail one can attain with a fine mesh screen.  Note it!

[flv:little_opera_shirts.flv 640 480]

SF Open Studios is coming up.  I will be practically giving away selling a new limited edition of screen prints on trash.

…If I don’t spend all my time organizing the event and designing promotional materials.  Here’s the postcard:

CELLspace Open Studios

11-5:30PM | Sat-Sun October 1-2, 2011 | 2050 Bryant St

Did I mention Erin is starting a kid opera company?

By company I of course mean a struggling non-profit, and by starting I of course mean spending every weekday in a foul mood over municipal tax codes or something.

When she decided Little Opera needed a logo, I referred her to a few colleagues.  When she decided she needed a free logo, I referred her to myself.   Anyway I thought it would be fun to document the process, since I’ve never made a logo.

The idea was to build something around the image of a feather, which holds some kind of significance in opera that I forget.   We found some beautiful gull feathers at Ocean Beach but they ended up being too detailed to make a good logo:

This failure made me realize how conspicuous a good logo really is, the perfect example one of those things that everyone else already knows about the world but I learn the hard way.  (However I will add that this was much easier than the way I learned how to correctly pronounce the word spatula, by getting beat up in the sixth grade for standing up for my mom’s invented enunciation.  “Spatoola.”  Thanks, mom.)

My next idea involved experimenting with a fat brush and black ink.  Over the last few years  I have begun to understand the supreme power of a well made mark and my new instincts led me to believe that bold brush strokes would translate into a successful logo.

By the end, a few graceful gestures proved most effective and I was left in appreciation of how the process of making a logo was in essence a series of simplifications.  It was a most enlightening lesson.

The final, vaguely featherlike logo:

Looks like I am doing graphics and set for Erin‘s next play, which is being produced in Berkeley by Just Theater.  My first duty was to design this postcard.  It’s supposed to get you interested in the connection between earthquakes and dreams, ideally without invoking Tori Amos.

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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.

Bless me internet, for I have a confession to make.  I am not proud of my actions but I know that you will forgive me.  What have I done you ask, oh all knowing and sensible protocol of digital information transfer?   Well, I’m just going to write it quickly without thinking.  So here goes.   Judge me sympathetically.

Earlier this year, I sat in front of a computer for fifty hours and taught myself CSS and HTML.

There.

Yes there were many other things of much greater importance that needed to get done than sitting in front of a computer for fifty hours and learning CSS and HTML.  And yes almost every other part my life including my art already involves sitting in front of a computer to a near depressing degree that hardly justifies the addition of leisure time.  But as the code of this sub-par website became more obsolete by the minute, my ego just couldn’t handle the unfaced challenge of acquiring the knowledge needed to thrust it from 1998 standards.  I knew nothing and, with the deed now done and in the words of Ben, I now know next to nothing.

Ostensibly, the purpose of this fools errand was to get a fresh internet start with documentation of my latest series, Valencia to Vermont.   And I guess the point of this post is to announce that the series is officially online, programmed kind of the right way, and ready for your onslaught of clicks.  Just remember, even the stuff that looks the same was made from scratch, it took me a long long time, and I am a stubborn asshole who would rather pretend he can learn anything than pay someone competent to do anything right.

Prepare to be underwhelmed.  I give you:    (The website)

Next event: Wednesday.  Come check out this pain in the ass of an installation and see what all the non-fuss is about.  As for the lack of posts last month, well, I have been busy  moving and procrastinating at my day job.  However next week school is out and I start anew.  Get ready, internet. 

Here is the promo postcard to the restaurant art opening!  It is more of a bookmark, I guess.  Worth the half a day it took me to design? Probably not.  Worth the $30 cost to print 500 at nextdayfliers.com?  I would have to answer in the affirmative.  That place rules.