Silkscreening 2: The Randy Bandits

I'm a big fan of a lot of the concert poster designers working today—Heads of State, Aesthetic Apparatus, Patent Pending, Small Stakes, Ames Bros, the list goes on—so when I signed up for my silkscreen class one of the things I most wanted to try was good old fashioned rock show posters. To that end, I sent an email out to a number of friends of mine who are in bands, to see if anyone could use a few free posters. I got plenty of responses—it turns out bands in NYC know better than to turn down free promotional stuff. Since it was fresh in my brain, I decided to start with a poster for The Randy Bandits.

As I think I mentioned in the last blog, part of my motivation in choosing the style of the Live at Otto's CD cover was that I wanted to have something fun to silkscreen. Unfortunately, that didn't necessarily translate to "easy to silkscreen." I adjusted the design for the new size (the final poster is 14" x 17"), and changed the text so that they could use the poster for any show anywhere. Rather than just make an acetate directly from the original files, I decided to redraw the separations onto vellum, just to give it that much more of a handmade look—the bottom line of type wound up looking a little sloppier than I originally intended, but I kind of liked the look, so I left it that way. Here's a scan of the final poster:



The colors are a lot brighter than the original CD cover, so I can't quite get them to display properly onscreen, but I think you can get the basic idea. I clearly still have a way to go with my printing technique—the registration is sloppy throughout, the ink coverage is uneven, a couple posters were totally ruined by excess ink bleeding out around the edges, and the yellow screen in particular broke down quite a bit while printing, so a lot of the white areas have specks of yellow in them—I'm glad I didn't try to charge anything for these! But, as a first crack at a new medium, I'm not unhappy with the results.