Or Opossums Will Eat Your Face Process

[the hipoisie]

I haven't posted anything in a while, so here's my most recent art print. My prints usually have some overprinting going on anymore, nothing crazy like Crosshair's, but hopefully there's something interesting here.

This one starts by living in a neighborhood where the toothless folk like to leave these all over the place:


I got asked to take part in a propoganda-themed show, so I decided to make a print about the assholes and their Arctic Splash. And opossums, we have some of those in the neighborhood too. Here are some thumbnail sketches:


Sometimes I'll do a more detailed sketch, but I just dropped the one in the upper right into Illustrator and started drawing in there. Before I start drawing I usually already know how the colors will work, even if I'm not certain of the composition. This one will be three colors, dark brown, gray, and pink. The gray and pink will overprint the brown to get two more colors. So I first draw all the shapes as the five colors (six with white) that they'll appear in the end. That makes it easy to move pieces around and zero in on the composition. I end up changing it quite a bit from the sketch. Originally there were three cartons, now one, and I also considered some row homes and flowers in the background, but no. Drawing opossum fur in AI is a pain in the ass, so I just faked it and will fix it later.

When the composition is set I do a bunch of pathfinder-ing and get it back to three colors. I basically have some seps now. I don't really like vector prints, so I printed out each color and will throw them on the light table to make new brush and ink seps.


I decided to modify the shadows on the paws a little. I'll do the rest of the opossum separately and stick it all together in Photoshop, since it will probably take me a couple tries to get right.

[the hipoisie]

Kenzinger.


Despite the bottle of Higgins behind the beer, this is what I ink with. I think I stole this setup from Ewing. I don't think the stone is really meant to be used like this, but it works well.


The new inked seps. I'll fill the large areas in Photoshop.


And some of the opossum. These are the second try, because as expected after I put the first try in PS it looked terrible.


So they're scanned at 1200 dpi, because they're only 2/3 finished size, and need to leave PS as 600dpi bitmaps. When they're enlarged I tighten up the registration a little in some spots, but I don't get too picky about it, if I wanted it perfect I would have left them vectors. The fur was confusing with the overprinting and using some of the inks as masks, but I eventually ended up with:

[dspring]

looks great...nice process as well

[hartman]

I wish iced tea was all the toothless people around here left behind...

Nice process so far.

[ronvin]

I think you mean, 'O possum eat yo face!'.

[SammyV]

looking good Dan

[the hipoisie]

Thanks guys.

Don't have a lot of printing pics, because I was racing against daylight, and getting the ink transparency right takes a lot of trial and error. I save the PS layers as bitmap tiffs and drop them into AI where I add crop marks, labels, and print. Here's are the screens, kind of dirty because I took these after I was done. Printing on big screens is nice. Although I should take a photo of the 1860s spiral stairs I navigate them up and down, that's not nice.



Brown.


Pink.


Done!


Some of the registration is dead on, some is a little off, as expected. I like the looseness, and have tried hard to be less anal about my drawings.


And framed for the show.

[hartman]

Came out great.

[doggydoodle]

Extra effort made this great!

[mikeybloodbath]

Sweet, thanks for the process!