Gig poster printing with SAVWO

I've been back to Hot Bed Press recently, this time I'm doing a course which is specifically aimed at making screen printed gig posters. Our tutor John Powell-Jones AKA Savage Wolf or SAVWO is a freelance illustrator and screen printer. As soon as I saw his work (see his Flickr here and MySpace here) I knew that I wanted to do the course, as his work which features zombies, werewolves and all other kinds of beasties, is right up my street. This time I decided to create some posters for the 'semi-fictional' band The Spooked Hearts which basically consists of me and my husband and a whole lot of noise-making that never really goes anywhere.

The idea for the poster actually originated from one of my husband's doodles which I found lying around. I think it amuses him greatly when I find these drawings and proclaim them to be genius. Maybe it is an exaggeration but there is something about the way he sketches without thinking that always seems to result in a truly surreal outcome. When I found his little drawing of a dancing harlequin boy with crosses for eyes and a giant tear falling down his face I knew I could develop it into a poster for our band. Below are the results: first the original poster design, then the resulting prints in two colour ways. We also printed onto t-shirts and John showed us how to easily set up a similar arrangement at home so that we could print there.

Nicholas Saunders

It really is a small world. Whilst at Hot Bed Press I noticed some work lying around by one of my favourite screen printers Nicholas Saunders. I first noticed his work when it was used in a couple of Howies catalogues such as the Three Bays edition (below) and looked him up on the internet to find he was a bit of a screen printer extraordinaire (Nicholas Saunders website here). Anyway it turns out that he's a local lad and in fact went to the same high school as me. He now resides in London and in 2007 was voted as one of the top ten hot UK illustrators by the Independent.

It seems the hype certainly paid off as he was recently commissioned by Warner Brothers to produce art work for the new Harry Potter film (see below). Inspiring stuff!

Read more at Creative Review here.

Photo Screen printing at Hot Bed Press

Currently I'm in the midst of a 5 week screen printing course (one evening a week) at Hot Bed Press in Salford. I really didn't know what to expect but Mandy our tutor is absolutely brilliant, really patient and clearly very enthusiastic about screen printing. So far we have approached it using both stencils and by exposing screens and although it can get quite technical and there is a lot to remember I am determined to get really good at it as the results are just so satisfying. Below are some of my outcomes which vary in quality but which also have a lo-fi feel which I appreciate and think is rather appropriate for a gig poster.

Original Photoshop image of Beth Ditto of The Gossip that I traced and made into a stencil (below)

The resulting single-colour print, one of the better ones (below)

Adding another colour brings with it inevitable complications however when your registration goes awry (below) it can actually look rather good.

Spiritualized poster turned into a two-colour screen print (below). The registration on the cloud was particularly tricky.

Original poster for Silversun Pickups (below).

And resulting print (below). This one turned out to be my nemesis as it didn't seem to matter how hard I tried I was always missing some of the finer detail. Mandy assured me that it is possible to produce very fine prints using a screen but that possibly some of the photographic emulsion may have hardened on the screen and was blocking it. There was nothing else to do but to start from scratch and expose the screen again. Unfortunately however, the same happened again which meant that it must have been a fault of the original photocopy (not dark enough).

Feeling a bit defeated I decided that this poster may just have to remain as a digital image instead. I have tried (below) to create a similar screen printed look using Photoshop.