MrBiggs dot comBrian Biggs illustration

I've really been loving the work of poster artists DKNG lately. I've bought a couple of their posters and I love the detail they put into their designs. Today they posted a terrific video showing, in time-lapse form, the creation of a poster for a Phish show in Hollywood. See if you can keep up and figure out exactly what's going on. If you have a decent understanding of screenprinting and know your way around Adobe Illustrator, you'll be fine.

Well it's out, and now I can safely say that when I retire as an illustrator and spend my days on the golf links in Boca Raton, I will have illustrated a Little Golden Book. I've loved Little Golden Books ever since I can remember. My grandmother's house had a stack of them that belonged to my aunts and uncles back in the 50's and 60's, and I liked the goofy stories and wonderful illustrations. At the time, I knew nothing of the legacy of these illustrators like Richard Scarry, Tibor Gergely, Leonard Weisgard, and Alice and Martin Provensen. As I grew up and went to college and became a designer, I forgot about much of the Golden Books.

It was only much later, while I was working on a poster for The Kids in the Hall in 2002, that I rediscovered these works. Mary Blair's I Can Fly, Garth Williams' Mister Dog, the Provenson's Color Kittens, and especially Scarry's Rabbit & His Friends were the inspiration for this poster.

Last year I discovered a book called Golden Legacy by Leonard Marcus. It's a history of Little Golden Books, and I was about halfway through it when I got a call from out of the blue, that the editors of Little Golden Books would like me to illustrate a new book called I'm a T.Rex, written by Dennis Shealy. Needless to say I fell over and was stunned.

I love drawing dinosaurs but I hadn't had a chance to draw dinosaurs for a book before. Sketches commenced. The T. Rex had to be fierce and angry but I wanted him to be kinda cute and funny as well.

The work went smoothly and just this last week, on May 11, it was officially "published" and released into stores. I got my copy on Thursday. And like I wrote, I'm pretty happy to be able to be part of the "story" of Golden Books now. I sure won't put my book up there in the same echelon as the Scarry, Gergely, and Prevensen books. But at least it's now sitting on the same shelf…

The Philadelphia Free Library Festival was this past weekend. Eric Wight and I had a little drawing show on Saturday for which I printed up this two-color poster. We didn't sell out at the festival so I've got them up on Etsy now. Get one while they hot.

Eric Wight and I are doing a program at the Philadelphia Free LIbrary Festival this weekend and we're printing a poster for the occasion. However, I've not been able to choose a particular color combibation. So with a few days left before I print these, I thought I'd ask some opinions. A caveat is that the nature of screen printing dictates that colors aren't always 100% predictable, and another is that we might end up making more than one version. Just curious what y'all think.

This last weekend I finished my second poster print for the screenprinting class I'm taking at The University of the Arts here in Philadelphia. The plan was to do a complicated print similar to my race car collages I made earlier in the year. However, Tuesday rolled around and I wasn't going to have it ready. So, as one does when one is unprepared, one makes a robot.
This design is one I made a year ago when I was first thinking about getting posters made. The heart comes from an old anatomy book my sister found somewhere in Arkansas.

The first color to go down was the light blue. The orange was next. A week or so later I printed the red line-art of the heart, and then last was the real warm grey part of the robot. You can kind of see where the grey overlaps the blue and makes it a darker, cooler grey.

I'm selling these things on Etsy. I haven't counted the editions yet, but I suspect there are fifteen or so good prints. If you want it, go get it!

Week three of my screenprinting class at The University of the Arts was last night and I was thrilled to get some ink down. Last week I had the first separation burned and ready. Last night was printing night. Class started out by viewing and admiring a selection of posters by Seripop, the Montréal-based poster-design duo of Yannick Desranleau and Chloe Lum. I'm familiar with Seripop and while I'm always happy to look at interesting posters, I was pretty single-minded, wanting to get right to mixing ink.
I bought a pretty standard Speedball green last week, but it was way too ugly for me to use for my vampire. Nuclear pukey green is more like what I was wanting. So I found a near-empty jar of bright bright yellow Speedball fabric ink, added quite a lot of white, and then dripped in my ugly green until it was perfect. I was surprised how little of my green I needed to get the color I wanted from that yellow. But when you see the color, I suppose it's really more yellow than green.
Can I say again how good it is to be making something analog, away from the computer? It is.
Greg and his assistant Annie were busy helping the other students so I was trying to go through all the steps that we'd been shown. Of course, until I actually do it I don't remember it. So I had to be reminded to tape the edges of my screen, put some cardboard bumpers on the bottom corners of my screen, correctly line up a sheet of mylar/acetate to set up positioning on my paper, cut five strips of tape to have ready for making my registration jig, etc. Thanks to Greg and Annie.

Finally it was time to print. The plan was to get at least twenty-five prints. I decided to just pull until I ran out of ink. There were some glitches as I went along, of course. Now and then I'd lose the right ear of the vampire kid, or some ink would glop in a place I didn't want it to. In my art-life, I have a weird habit of misusing materials. I've never been very fastidious with tools. I spill ink, I break knives, etc. So the computer has been good to me as I can just get to the image-making without the clean-up and my own clumsiness ruining the process. Of course, staring at a giant monitor has its own issues. Making the race-car collages earlier this year really opened up a new world of analog art to me, and solidified my need to have a tactile experience in making stuff. That all being said, imagine my surprise that I pulled forty good prints out of fifty. In my head I started planning out my silkscreen set-up here in my studio.

So my fifty prints were done and drying on the rack. I washed out my screen and squeegee and cleaned up while the screen was drying. Originally I was hoping to get both colors down tonight but seeing as how it was 9pm already, I realized that this wasn't going to happen. I was able to recoat the screen with emulsion and burn the second image, but will have to make it over to the university on either Sunday afternoon or Tuesday before class to print the violet. Stay tuned for all that.