April Art Show

This was my first art show! I got in there very fast. All it took was stopping in late one night and talking to the right person. It helped that I was wearing a hoodie with The Diddler print on it. That was a coincidence and I'm glad I had it on to show Ben (the right person) what my art looks like. He signed me up and they called me to hang this stuff a week later.


April is my birthday month and things always go well for me around this time. It's the spring energy. I also tend to get very creative during this season, but not in everything. I haven't been doing many drawings lately, mostly music and that's going very well.

For this show I hung 18 pieces that were a mix of framed and poster mounted prints. Most of these were the stoner rock series, skeletons with guitars. I also put a couple of others like the PBR can, Walt & Becky, and Lost Coast#1. I sold some, but more people flaked so I stopped calling people back. I figure if they really want it they'll get ahold of me. I prefer to do commissioned work.

I took these photos on the day they called me to take it all down, which was May 1st. I took it directly over to the next place I had arranged, The Coffee Break in Sunny Brae. That's my favorite coffee shop in town (the only one I ever go to), and the owner Carlos was easy to work with. More on that later.

The Diddler 4 color print

The original idea was to take one of my skeleton drawings and make it look good on a dark colored shirt.

I thought about it for weeks before I finally settled on four colors. The Diddler was a natural choice because it's a full body shot and was going to be fairly easy to break down into only a few colors.

The art was somewhat challenging to translate to silkscreen because it's originally on a black background with a glow that is almost like a black velvet painting. If I was going to print on a black shirt I wanted to use the shirt for the outline rather than print black ink. It created more of a challenge to convert the art. I ended up scrapping that idea and just planned on printing the black after all because that would also allow me to print on a variety of shirt colors.

I really wanted to do some fluorescent color prints so I went ahead and bought a nice selection of high opacity fluorescent inks. I like the excalibur brand. I also bought a bright white ink. The white would be the underbase and outer glow and the I decided on purple pants, green body, and black for the outline.

I successfully burned, taped, and aligned the 4 screens to get ready for the printing. I tried printing on a few different color shirts I had around and found that I liked bright color shirts for this print. I went with the royal blue and purple. I didn't think I would wear a purple tshirt again, but I liked this one so much that I saved a medium for myself. I also tried a few different placements like on the back, down at the bottom, and finally settled on the center of the chest.

The print turned out great and it's really fun to wear!
I've got this shirt and others for sale on a good website for handmade goods, called Etsy

Bucky Walters Shirt Run #2

I love printing shirts for bands! Here's a little story about the second run of Bucky Walters shirts I did.

These guys are a local favorite bluegrass band called, The Bucky Walters. I've never actually seen them play from what I can remember but they live in the same neighborhood as me. I met them through my neighbor Malcolm, who lives across the street and is a much more sociable guy than I am. He introduced me to Niko, who is the mandolin player and the guy who has been

dealing with the business end of the band merch.

I did one run of shirts for them not too long ago and it turned out well. I understand that they sell a good amount of merch, so this time they wanted to go with the higher quality Amercian Apparel brand of Tshirts. These are made in USA down in L.A. and are the nicest shirts I've had the pleasure of owning. They do cost more, but overall seem well worth it considering the great fit and soft fabric. The last run they did was brown girly shirts and white T's for guys. The brown was so popular that they decided to do some mens shirts in brown this time. The girly shirts he decided on were a hip style of retro ringer T in a two tone chocolate with brown. I had my doubts, but he seemed confident. I placed the order with AA through my sister who has a wholesale account with then through her brand of hip girly clothes, Pretty Me.

The shirts arrived and they looked great! Niko asked me to match the brown on the sleeves and collar, so I mixed a batch of dark brown plastisol ink with a little black and it worked fine. I printed the 27 girly shirts in less than an hour and here's how they look. Impressively cool with the ringer T; good choice Niko! I bet the sell a ton of these. It's a good looking print too.

The art was done by one of the guys in the band and features duelling chickens. The band provided the screen which was a 225 mesh count and worked just fine for this job. I'll also be using the same screen to print the brown mens shirts. For that job I'll be using the flesh colored ink that shows up as a light tan or khaki color on the brown shirt.

Here's the mens in brown.

Promo Sticker Run #1

I do silkscreening out of my garage at home in Arcata, California. This was an idea I had to promote my art business and to help out some fellow musicians.

I had a few ideas for some stickers that I wanted to print for one of my bands, and I also wanted some stickers for my art business itself. I didn't anticipate needing hundreds of either for the moment, so I figured why not offer some space on the screen for some of my friends?

I sent out some emails and got a few prompt replies. I worked up some art for my own ideas and then arranged the jpegs the other folks sent me. Turns out I also needed to print up some medical pot stickers, so the screen filled up fast. I was printing on pieces of vinyl material cut to approx. letter size. The screen itself could have fit more art. This was also way to use up some of this material I had.

I figured I'd print from 50-100 sheets of vinyl. This was a one color job, but I like to print on a variety of colored material. I thought about using some black and then some white ink, but ended up just doing the black because the stencil started to break down during cleaning. This pink emlulsion I used is not designed for the solvent based ink, so it doesn't last too long.

This old screen has served me well and may have to be retired soon because it has a small tear in the middle. It didn't affect this run at all since it was taped up and off to the side anyway.

I finished the run in about an hour. I ended up printing about 70 sheets with very few blems. The cutting wasn't too tedious and I finished that by the next morning which was the famous 4.20. Around here that's a big deal to a lot of people. Tonight just happens to be the night of a show I'm highly anticipating at The Alibi in Arcata with Slough Feg and Trigger Renegade. Both are classic metal bands with different flavors of a twin guitar attack. All I know is that I really like both of them and so do many other people who know a good rock band. This will be fun!

So, back to the stickers. They turned out great!

The bands will each get a nice handful to use as they please. Silkscreened by hand in Humboldt County. We've got rabbits, chickens, hippos, skeletons, motorcycles, and sweet leef. The only one without an image is for The Plague, which is a local underground music publication that is a great supporter of our local music and scene. I can't wait to stick some of these and also to see them around town!

I still have some folks who are responding to my original offer, so another run will be coming soon! I like the idea of offering this once every so often as my way of supporting the scene. Stay tuned...