Los B at the Limelight Lounge, Haverhill MA, 6/29

More stuff coming

Gonna have a new flyer up by Saturday afternoon for a show at O’Brien’s in Allston featuring Luau, the Big Sway, Old Grey, and Oh The Humanity!.

Finally getting something done outside of Lowell!

Until then, anxiously awaiting the arrival of these 4.25×5.5 stickers:

Flyer for Los Bungalitos, KDC, My Fictions, The Turn, Matahari, and Oh the Humanity! at the Tap, Haverhill MA June 29th

This is what Los B looks like.

THE FUTURE

So I’m doing a little networking this week. I’ve got a lot of talented friends and it turns out I haven’t done anything that really pushed my limits in a long time, so I’m reaching out to everybody and I’ve gotten a few responses already. Expect to see some epic pieces this year, definitely.

 

SO MANY COLORS AND VOMIT

“Learn to be p…

“Learn to be poor yet dedicated, forever. Step away from the computer every chance you can and learn how to be flexible as an artist/designer. Learn art history, color theory, grid systems, typography, photography, and illustration. Work with other artists/designers around you. We all learn from one another. Education is everything, but the institution isn’t. School is great, but retaining information is better. With that said, Art School is great for some and a waiting room for others. It’s certainly not a requirement to be an artist. Once you have a knowledge base, the world is yours to make.”

-Jacob Bannon

New Flyer, April 28th, the Worthen Lowell MA

A quick on in that pop art style I do. Color scheme blatantly stolen from the book cover for Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad (awesome book, each chapter focuses on an in-depth behind the scenes view of the rise and occasional fall of some legendary indie/post-hardcore 80’s-90’s bands).

Given the influx lately of kids moshing or being all-around unpleasant at shows, I think I might keep going with this “Play Nice” tag at the bottom. I’m sure the bartenders at the Worthen have no problems with it saying “tip well.”

That’s that!

P.S. It’s a lady giving birth in a kiddie pool, only I changed her head for a horse, just so you know.

 

So here’s the most recent flyer I’ve done. Hadn’t hand-painted anything in a long time, so I figured I’d try getting back into that. By the time I finished the drawing, I realized it seemed really dark and creepy in terms of content, so the crazy brightness of those colors is there to (hopefully) offset that. My plan is to eventually get a little Artograph projector and do the paint first, then ink, all on one piece instead of doing them separately and digitally combining them…but we’ll see how long that takes.

PART 2: How Joe and I made the screen printed posters for the show at Furey’s

In case you missed part one, here it is: Part 1: How Joe and I made the screen printed posters for the show at Furey’s

Okay, so I left off with the black and white drawing being completed, Joe’s spray paint writing was on it, and we were ready for color. Here’s that drawing again:

Yay.

So, now, I needed to make color separations.

I went back into the PSD file and tried to organize the layers by what colors I thought they would be. One thing to keep in mind for color choice, beyond just what colors look cool, is also value (how light or dark it is). Like, imagine you take a color print and then convert it to black and white: a blue or red is going to be a darker shade of grey than a yellow would turn into, unless you’ve got an insanely light blue or pink, and even those might still be slightly darker.

I was thinking we could use the colors to actually get some more shading out of this than just what the ink drawing had. Also, I figured we could use the color to make some things fade into the background while other things popped out more. Here’s a shot of how the layers were organized by what colors I thought we’d be using.

So there's the top bunch, which are the final sorted color seps (took a while), and then the little folder icons are grouped by "character" ie josh, james, matt, the bar, etc.

First thing to explain here:  See that blue layer is dark, so having Matt and the other characters with no blue on them makes them really stand out against the darker background. On Matt, since he’s the star of the show more or less, I also knocked out some of the yellow. The whole poster has a yellow underprint except for the highlights on Matt, so he should have higher contrast and seem more up front than anything else. Not having any blue on the bottom makes the smaller writing a little easier to read. It didn’t matter much to me and Joe about how dark the blue was up top because those band names are such heavy shapes, we assumed they’d show up no problem. I’m happy to say, I think we were right.

Now, I’ve got the seps on top, and those are all really just copied layers from the character layers. Even though the ink part is done, I still didn’t want to lose the ability to change what colors individual aspects were, and once all the stuff that’s red, from every different red layer, gets flattened into one layer, unless you get really creative about it, you’re pretty stuck. Your other option would be to try to find an old file and start the seps over from scratch.

NOTE: Regarding starting over from scratch, I was also prepared to do that if need be. I’ve got about 6 or 7 different PSD files saved for this one, all from different stages. The one that this is a screenshot of isn’t actually the final PSD file, it just illustrates the point about keeping things editable. The final color seps one wasn’t used until the day before we exposed the screens.

Just to give a timeframe real quick on all this junk:

• Sorting out photos with Joe was about an hour to and hour and a half for me, took him a little longer to go through them all (he’s got a ton of photos and was home before I was, by the time I got here he’d already sorted through a pretty large external hard drive full of stuff).
• Setting up the first draft of the tracing source PSD was two or three hours for me, with about a half hour to an hour’s worth of tweaking after getting Joe’s input.
• Drawing, as usual, was about two and a half hours.
• Trying to redo Matt’s face was another hour (I ended up drawing just his face another 6 times, picking the best one and ‘shopping it back into the black ink layer).
• Sorting out color seps took another hour and a half I’d guess (setting up an open-ended PSD file, while giving you unlimited editability, also leaves you with a LOT of layers to sort through…and I’ve got a bad habit of not labeling my layers, so it take longer for me to figure out what I’m doing)

and now we’re up to speed. So Joe’s added Tini’s band, I’ve set up the color seps more or less, and the final part of THIS stage in setup was getting registration marks on them and printing them out.

Knowing we were only doing four colors, and initially thinking we’d be using excess paint from the museum, we figured the colors would be black, red, green, and yellow, so that’s how the seps were designed initially. We ended up buying our own paint and mixing on the fly, with a much better color scheme of black, orange, blue-green, and yellow. Here are the seps:

In order, from the first thing you print to the last thing you print, it goes yellow, orange, blue, black. You want to go light-to-dark.

So each of these has little crosses on the corners so we can line them up when printing. Also, each of these is made up of 100% black or 100% white with no shades of grey. That’s for exposing the screens. Greys are really unpredictable, and in any case, with screens whatever is black on your printout is going to be printable…but whatever is grey will either print 100% or not at all in spots…so there’s no reason to ever set it up with shading like that UNLESS you set them up in halftone screens (the little dots of white on the blue sep, that kind of sunset looking fading circle above the bar, that’s a halftone screen made up of dots of 100% black ink at varying sizes to give the illusion of a gradient).

OMG I TOTALLY FORGOT TO MENTION THIS IN PART 1: To create a halftone screen like that, one that you can use in color seps like this, you want to go to Filter/Pixelate/Color Halftone in Photoshop, but you want it to be in a file that’s set to Grayscale as the color mode. So if I was working in full color and wanted the dots to just be one color instead of four jumbled up colors, I needed to do the following:

1. I made a circle gradient in the color file at the location I wanted it
2. I copied that layer to a new GRAYSCALE file and applied the filter
3. Copied it back into the color file
4. Made it 100% black
5. Select/Color Range selected the white to delete it
6. Changed what was left to the color I wanted.

Okay, so we’ve got our printouts, and what we do here is tape them to the bottom of a coated screen printing screen. By bottom, I mean the completely flat side that is on the front of the frame. Then it gets exposed by whatever means you or your screen printer friend or whoever uses…everybody seems to have a completely different way of doing things than the next guy, but if they’ve done it enough, the end result is always fine.

Yay, only 6 more hours to go before we've got posters!

So we’re looking at the bottom  of the screens right now. This is the side that will actually touch the paper or shirt you’re printing on. The one at the top left is the black screen. When you’re printing, if you’re using that screen, you’ll see it from this angle:

It's not backwards!

Not sure how to explain the whole setup thing in terms of “the paper you tape to it needs to be backwards relative to the front/bottom of the screen, but when you look at while printing it, the thing will totally NOT be backwards” any clearer, so if you try this out, just pay close attention before you expose them?

We actually didn’t expose the screens ourselves. Joe has a friend who does this stuff at home and she said the exposure unit in-house was kind of lousy. Joe was the first to admit he didn’t know anything about exposure units other than the one at the museum, so I didn’t really know what was up until I saw the thing, and when I did I was glad he had a connection who could hook us up. I’d never seen a setup like that before, so I would have been lost on it as well. Joe’s friend, whose name I don’t remember and I’m real sorry about that, was pretty particular about wanting these on clear plastic or acetate instead of paper, but she decided to douse the printed seps in olive oil to make them more transparent. I’d never heard of that before, but like I said, everybody who does this stuff seems to do it differently. So far, I haven’t seen a single method that’s been crappy, they’re all just different. When I did commercial screen printing, we’d just expose it longer if it was a paper one instead of clear acetate, but then we had basically an airtight blacklight exposure unit the size of a dining room table, so that’s probably a whole different budget than the DIYers out there.

Next step was mounting the screens and trying to set up registration on a test print. This whole registration thing got scrapped because the ink was drying too fast and was clogging up the screens. We used acrylic paint for budget reasons (budget schmudget, even doing this on the cheap cost about$70 for supplies… which doesn’t seem like much until you drop that cash), and acrylic paint tends to dry pretty quick once you spread it out.

Printing the registration test poster

There’s me (eww) printing the registration test. If you look close, you’ll see I’m trying to flood the screen with ink using my right hand, I’m pretty much just trying not to drop the squeegee on the floor with my left hand. To flood it, you fill the screen with ink, not pushing down hard enough to print. Then you pull down from top to bottom, pushing into the screen to get the ink or paint through it.

Here’s that whole flooding thing:

The screen is partially flooded now. All the ink on it is laid on evenly, but not quite thick enough here, so there are some fresh gobs of ink on the top and bottom of the image. Once those get spread around, you're good to go. Next thing you do is pull that squeegee down at an angle to push the yellow through the screen.

Here’s that yellow layer printed out:

And here’s how the registration test came out:

Joe and I both wanted this one, so we flipped a coin to decide who got to keep it. It was me. And that's AWESOME.

Ideally, I’d be printing one completed poster at a time, but we just couldn’t manage it. The ink was drying too fast on the screens, but it was drying too slow on the paper. If we’d done it the way you’re supposed to, we’d have a bunch of brown splotchy awful peices of paper floating around. What we did instead was print all the papers with yellow ink, wait for it to dry, then eyeballed registration for the orange and printed, then all the blue, then all the black. Since we had to register is by eye through the screen, things didn’t always line up.

It ended up looking pretty cool with all those mistakes though.

So, just to sort of recap and let you know what we were thinking, here’s the digital seps again:

In order, from the first thing you print to the last thing you print, it goes yellow, orange, blue, black. You want to go light-to-dark.

Here are those screens exposed:

And here’s part of our sample of what the screens printed one at a time:

So the idea is that when you print on one sheet in order from left to right, you're supposed to get our poster. We more or less did it right?

 

Here’s a shot of everything drying during the yellow layer:

All the posters 1/4 of the way completed with a very handsome man bringing sexy back without even trying

Next step was getting the orange on there. We mixed our own color for the other layers, figuring we’d have more control over the tone of everything if we just started with primary colors and worked our way toward what we wanted.

Orange by itself

There are some knocked-out white blotches next to Matt’s face there. The idea was that those areas would look pretty cool if the shapes didn’t have this mid-tone of orange. It goes back to that whole light-dark value idea: yellow is light, but still darker than just white, the orange is like 40% darker than white, the blue layer is more like an 80% darker thing, and then black was 100%…in my head anyway. Thankfully, everything was probably closer to 20% lighter than I had initially thought, so the blue didn’t completely darken everything up. It gave the black some real pop once it all came together, having those other colors be lighter.

Here’s a nifty shot of the orange on the yellow:

Oooooh, aaahhhh

Again, we had to eyeball the registration because the paint dried so fast. It was easy enough to get it almost right on this layer, but it’s still off. The white highlights on Matt are off by about a quarter of an inch. It didn’t matter too too much because the yellow is so light, Joe and I were both saying “well, as long as the dark inks come out right on point, we’ll be fine.”

They didn’t really all come out on point. But that’s why we made 35 of them and then picked only 21 to sell.

Next was the blue/green layer. Joe decided this was a good layer to get some weird blending going on with the paint so we got all sorts of nutty when flooding the screens. Some pretty great results with that.

Joe printing the blue layer. You can see some streaking in the screen from tossing dollops of white and other colors.

And here’s a good example of how those turned out:

See the color variation in the sky part of the drawing? That's Joe's idea, came out pretty rad. His hippie friends love that shit.

You can also see what I was saying about the light-dark balance of the individual colors. Matt’s head, with his horns and everything, is jumping right out next to the darker blue area. Very high contrast on that. Zombie-Moxie has a decent amount of contrast, while James eating the bar is a little less in-your-face. That halftone screen to sort of mimic a sunset there makes the contrast around James and Moxie a little lower, but the flat block of blue-green around Matt’s head creates some really strong tonal differences that make Matt an even more defined focal point.

And that’s art school. I’m paying upwards of $500 a month in student loans to two schools to be able to write that paragraph. And nobody else I know ever talks that way, especially art people, so I don’t know why a person pays so much to have to write essays in a way nobody can understand. Maybe if it was science or something…

Anyway, here’s an army of posters about to get totally ruined:

Almost done...

Okay, so now we add the final layer.

I stepped out for a cigarette and let Joe take the first shift on the black layer. This happened:

"I just got so excited I forgot to line it up!" -Joe

It came out pretty cool though. We didn’t sell that one, but we liked it a lot just the same.

If you've seen the posters and are wondering why some of them came out the way they did, look at the foreground of this photo and you have your answer.

By this point, we were a little buzzed and the posters were still drying from that blue layer. The yellow layer took the longest to wait for, the orange layer dried quick because it wasn’t quite as drenched in paint, and the blue one took the second-longest to dry. We had to check for a mostly-dry one before printing the next, so the order got a little weird. We numbered them based on…a completely arbitrary system actually.

Handsome (hand-suhm) adj. having an attractive, well-proportioned, and imposing appearance suggestive of health and strength; good-looking.

 

And then in the end we had these:

They all came out a little different, some completely messed up, so we printed 35 and narrowed it down to 21 for sale.

And that’s that. If anybody out there has any tips for screen printing posters (aside from registration, we know allll about how we messed that up), feel free to comment suggestions. We really want to do something like this again awe want it to be better each time.

Thanks!

PART 1: How Joe and I made the screen printed posters for the show at Furey’s

Here's the end result

You can skip this part, it’s sort of the prologue

So here’s some quick background of how this show was set up. Tim, who you’ll get to see up close in a few, is in both Hivesmasher and Los Bungalitos, and he books shows. Furey’s is a quiet little bar in Lowell, occasionally sketchy but all-in-all a great alternative to dealing with bros at the Village Smokehouse or the crowds at the Worthen (I like the Worthen, but if you’re in one of those moods where you just want to drink your beer and not bump into anybody, Furey’s is the bar for you). Tim also used to live in my apartment, which is walking distance from Furey’s (might explain his affection for the place, but I’m pretty sure he’d just drive drunk anyway, out of laziness). Anyway, turns out almost all the people who live in the upstairs and downstairs units of my apartment are in bands (Los Bungalitos and the Big Sway being Joe’s bands, Hivesmasher being Aaron from downstairs, Pathogenic has Chris and Dan from downstairs, and another upstairs roommate, Tini, just started a band called Oh! The Humanity.). Oh, and I’m in Old Grey. Tim thought it would be funny to book a show with all the roommates’ bands.

And so it was.

Joe and I thought it would be cool to commemorate this event in a limited-edition screen printed flyer. His work recently got a silkscreen setup, so we figured if we got the supplies, there’d be no problem just cranking these out after hours. We also decided that the way to do it, since we both wanted our art all over this thing, was for me to handle the image and base it all on Joe’s photography. Once the image was set, Joe would handle the type.

So, here’s what happened (you can start reading here if you skipped that first part)

So Joe went and took a bunch of photos of the outside of Furey’s, then sat down and sent me a bunch of his photography. The initial photos Joe sent from his portfolio were really good, but I couldn’t find a way to integrate them into a single image -a good photograph doesn’t necessarily make for a good element in a garbagey surreal tracing. The initial batch of photos basically consisted of already-complete images (the image can’t really be broken down into its parts because it’s already kind of a larger scene without any individual characters, more of a mood than a portrait) and there weren’t any elements I thought I could extract and find a new home for. So we talked about what we needed to start from and ended up with these:

This is our cat. Technically, Tini owns the cat, but he terrorizes all of us equally.

This is Tim, drummer for Los B and Hivesmasher. From day 1 in this project, I wanted to do something awful to Tim. Couldn't really say why, he never did anything to me, but it just seemed like the right thing to do.

This is our buddy Moxie. He crashed at the apartment for an extended stay at one time, and this photo looked easy to zombify.

Furey's

This is Josh, a friend of Joe's from his home in western MA. There's a painting of Josh staring at the viewer hanging in our apartment. When that painting isn't around, the room feels like something is missing, so in a weird way the image of Josh is sort of integral to our whole apartment experience.

Joe's brother, Matt, in high school. Apparently that sledgehammer is held by a player on the Agawam team who achieves something badass. So this is kind of like when army guys have photos taken with all their medals, except in this case it's Joe's brother with a hammer. Fun fact: Joe is standing on a chair to get this shot. His brother is standing in a hole 3 feet deep. The kid is HUGE.

Photo of a cow Joe took on a group photo trip to Mexico led by professor Arno Minkkinen.

Nice photo Joe took of some pigeons in Lowell. I think this is one of those photos Joe likes to blow up real big and mount on plywood.

So there’s the source material.

Photoshoppery commences!

First things first, cutting out the bits from each photo.

Obviously Furey’s is the setting for the image, so that was the first thing to cut out. Since it’s mostly hard lines, cutting it out was pretty quick and easy using the line selection tool in Photoshop (the one that looks like  a triangle and half the time you have a bitch of a time finding the start point to close the shape, especially on a gray image since it all blends together).

Had to add a little street texture to the foreground. Knowing it'd be drawn later, it didn't really matter.

Note: When laying out these shapes to create the initial image, the key isn’t trying to get the contrast and light-dark levels to look good, it’s estimating how clearly you’ll be able to see the details through a light-table when tracing. It’s actually best if the lighting goes sort of flat. Like here, the side of the building on the left of the image should be a lot darker, but you want to be able to see the detail over there when it’s printed out so you can draw it. If the contrast doesn’t seem right when you draw it, you just put more dark shading in where it needs to go.

From the start, I figured we’d have James the cat destroying something, so why not the bar we’re all playing?

Turned him at an angle. In the final product, this is actually 2 layers: His head and his body. In the photoshop file, layer order goes head on top, furey's, james' body underneath. You'll see it in action in a bit.

Next up, Josh and that cow. Since the photo of Josh was cropped a little, I had to google search for a usable arm and leg.

Check out Josh's bicep. It's not because he's a great tennis player...

The photo of Matt is pretty striking, so I thought he’d be great to have front and center being all sorts of menacing. After putting him in context, I decided he wasn’t menacing or weird enough, so I googled “goat horns” and added some. Then I thought he needed to be brought down a peg, so I took Joe’s pigeons and had them hanging out on him, like he’s trying to pose all badass and it turns out he’s just snuggly with birds.

I ended up not drawing the pigeon on his head. I think it like blocked something, can't remember why honestly...

Here’s a great example of that whole contrast thing I mentioned above with the photo of the bar. This photo had a lot of decent contrast and I thought I’d lose the ability to capture that detail on the light table. When you print out your source image, you have to think about how much lighter everything will be when lit from underneath, especially once you put the blank piece of paper on top of it to draw on. I lightened up a lot of the black areas here too, those tend to be hard to decipher through the sheet you draw on, and I increased the mid-tone contrast. I darkened some of the highlights as well, though not all of them. Here’s an illustration to kind of explain it:

So the bottom layer represents the source printout lit from underneath on a light table. The top layer is the sheet of paper you're drawing on. When that sheet goes on top of the source sheet, you lose a bunch of visible detail. Knowing that this is going to happen, you try to mess with contrast enough in the PSD file to be able to compensate...then you squint a lot while you trace and put your face up real close to the paper.

Finally, we get Tim and Moxie. I asked Joe for the Moxie photo specifically because I thought he’d be a good zombie from that angle, and I figured if James couldn’t carry Tim’s head in his mouth, Moxie could carry it in his hand.

Moxie, not carrying Tim's head. Since his feet were blocked by the bridge in the photo, I stuck him on the roof

Tim's head. I added blood drips, and even though you can't see it, I gave him zombie/shark eyes.

I added a 3-pixel black stroke to all the layers using the layer styles option. It makes it a LOT easier to tell the shapes apart in a black and white printout. Once the initial drawing is done, you can add your own thicker lines around your characters/shapes to create some depth and get things to pop out from the background a little better. Here’s the completed photoshop layout.

Complete Photoshop layout

You can see that whole James layer-order thing here. If you’re not used to Photoshop, imagine the layers as being printed on clear plastic like on those overhead projectors from high school and you’ll be all set. You can slide them around and change the order of things to create your final image.

It’s best when doing Photoshop work, ESPECIALLY for small local events, to create in a non-destructive manner. What I mean by this is, I could have kept James as one layer, put Furey’s on top, and cut out from the roof of the bar layer to expose James’ head underneath, which would have been a “destructive edit,” meaning you can’t undo it later on. Instead, James’ head sits on top, the bar stays in the middle, and James’ body is underneath. I could move James anywhere on the page and still have his head poking out over the bar and have the complete bar with no missing chunks. IMPORTANT: With events set up by your friends, and especially if they involve local bands, you ALWAYS want to be able to undo, change, add, remove, etc.  right up until the last minute. Go ask Tom Southerton from the Ant Cellar, a local basement show venue, how many times he’s had to change the wording on a flyer a day or two before the show if you don’t think you need to be able to do this.

So, Moxie’s a giant, which is fine by me. With something like this, in this style, for this KIND of show (two punk bands, a grind band, a funk band, a proggy-death metally band, and a melodic punk-metal band) you can pretty much break any rules you want. The lineup for the bands is a good one, but it’s a little random in terms of musical style. Personally, I prefer playing and going to multi-genre shows like this one, and I think it exposes fans of one type of music to a lot of bands they wouldn’t have sought out on their own…but meh, maybe that’s just me. Sometimes people want to mosh and only mosh.

Those people are idiots, by the way. There was a guy at a show last week who only wanted to mosh and he just kept asking if the next band was moshable. I don’t understand how you go to a show wanting to do that, you’re the only guy there in that mindset and you know it, and you don’t actually care if the bands are any good…just seems dumb. That’s like applying for jobs and only taking them if they involve using a shovel, and then you end up digging mass graves for the Khmer Rouge or some shit. Just because all you care about are shovels, nevermind if it’s a good reason to use one.

That was hyperbole and probably a really odd comparison. Anyway.

So Joe and I went over the layout PSD (that’s the file extension for Photoshop files, it’s shorter than typing “Photoshop file,” but it took a lot of words to explain that just now). We made a few tweaks to the original and came up with what we have above. Then I printed the stuff out a few days later and spent a few hours drawing this:

It's everything you hoped it wouldn't be...

You can see those crosses: they’re for registration. I also drew them on the printout. This way, if you unstick the drawing from the source, you can line it back up and not totally screw yourself over. Joe and I had a few discussions about the empty space, how the writing would fit into it, and Matt’s face didn’t come out quite right. At first, I was pissed, but then I agreed with Joe…sometimes something takes you EFFING forever and you get defensive…but not out of thinking it’s perfect – mostly out of being tired of drawing your friend’s brother’s face.

Moving on…

Joe makes giant letters that look really cool.

So I gave Joe the scanned sketch above and he looked it over for a bit and figured out how he wanted to do the type.

Now, to give some background, Joe works at the Revolving Museum in Lowell. Within the last couple years, they’ve changed locations and now have an AWESOME setup where they have access to what we all affectionately refer to as The Tunnel. It’s a space underneath where two buildings join on the second or third floor, with big double doors facing the street and a fence blocking access to the parking lot/courtyard inside. They’ve had a few really awesome all-ages, no booze, no drugs, no violence punk shows there (the acoustics are surprisingly awesome). The museum used the space to also do a graffiti workshop which Joe taught, and here’s a lovely photo of some idiots hanging around outside of it before  a show:

And you know it's a great place for a punk show because there's our buddy Moxie in the red hat (not being a zombie on a bridge), and he likes him some punk rock.

So having access to this, and because you can do graffiti, and because you may as well go all out with the crazy dirt on a screen printed punk flyer, Joe did his lettering in spraypaint and huge.

Almost there...almost all the bands...

Right on top, obviously the best band ever. Often confused for Old Gray, who are good, but got their band name like 4 months later and are decidedly less metal...

And of course there’s the other details from the show, which Joe spray painted at a later date on the underside of a desk I was throwing out…which coincidentally, used to be Tim’s desk. Oh, and the scanner I use also used to be Tim’s. Come to think of it, I pretty much live off of his garbage…

So from here, Joe converted the photos to black and white, did some tricks to isolate the band names, and threw it on the flyer.

BEST TRICK EVER: I had no idea about the power of the “Select Color Range” option in Photoshop until Joe showed me. Basically, he blasted these photos to flat black and white, no grey tones and then went to Select/Color Range and selected “Shadows” from the drop down menu in there. That lets you select only the black without getting stupid little halos around everything like you would if you used the magic wand tool.

So here’s that:

BTW, real quick: Tini's band didn't have a name yet. We added them to the flyer the week of the show. That's why it's IMPORTANT to leave your PSD files editable, once again. One time, I tried to do a flyer with the writing being part of the original drawing, and if the drummer for one of the bands hadn't called before I finished writing the headliner's name, it would have all ended in tears.

Boom, all the bands and Matt's new face.

That seems like enough for now. The creative process has been sufficiently documented, so Part 2 will focus on getting the screen printing part done, and that’s where the real fun stuff happens.

(Part 2 might be more or less interesting, depending on your POV. Joe and I definitely had more fun printing them than we did bitching at each other over creative process. And I said some douchey things about ‘visual hierarchy’ which I later realized were both douchey and stupid –  nobody cares about that crap, it only matters if the end result looks cool.)