Buncha new posters & a drop on Monday
APs for The Avett Brothers, Wilco, and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival...we've been busy.
Hi. Hope you’re doing well, and that your summer is off to a good start…maybe it’s been going for a while already? I don’t know…I’ve been buried in the studio for bit—we all have—and a fun byproduct of that is that now we’ve got a bunch of posters all coming out at once. I’m writing this now on a vacation of sorts from an undisclosed location in the actual mountains with a spotty connection, so this’ll (probably) be another short one.
CUTTING TO THE CHASE
This coming Monday, June 24th—at 3PM CENTRAL TIME—we’re dropping our artist editions for THREE recent posters, and I’m stoked about all of them: The Avett Brothers in Paso Robles, California, Wilco at the Salt Shed in Chicago, and one for the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Telluride, Colorado, which is happening right now and ends tomorrow.
Those images below are what they look like, and yesssss…we have foils. Actually, the foils were printed on the absolute last sheets of a really nice-but-forever-discontinued brushed gold foil stock that I kinda love, despite never being able to get more of it.
I’m really excited that we got to do one of these posters for The Avett Brothers, and also that I finally got to play with the iconic visual language of those WPA travel posters from the early days of screenprinted posters. It was really fun nerding out and trying my hand at that wonky typography, and conveniently, the album art for the new Avett Brothers album bears a drawing that worked perfectly in place of the seal of the Department of the Interior that appears on all of the original WPA posters.
Oddly enough, the very first screenprinted poster I ever made for a band I wasn’t friends with (or in) was for Wilco…there were only a few of them, and they’re lost to history now (because they weren’t very good), but this actually has nothing to do with that: I got asked by the good people of Conscious Alliance to make a poster for Wilco’s recent shows at the Salt Shed in Chicago. Conscious Alliance is a great non-profit that works with bands to convert poster sales into meals and food for people in need, which is kind of amazing and a cool thing to be able to help out with.
They completely sold out of their copies of this thing at the show and in their online store, so we’ve got the absolute LAST copies of this thing. Act accordingly (if you want to).
For years, I’ve been messing with different ways to reproduce pencil drawings in the screenprint technique…to varying degrees of success and failure. This poster was one where I went all in and just tried to separate out the layers—four individual layers and ink colors make up the pencil marks on this poster—in a similar way that I separate out all the CMYK work we print. It was a little bit different, adapted for grayscale and relying on different value adjustments of the same drawing to create a light, middle, and dark tone that could be rebuilt into a single image, but I get nervous that none of that is terribly interesting for most people, and I imagine you’ve likely glazed over by now, so I’ll just say this: A THING I TRIED TO DO KINDA WORKED, at least to the degree that I’d hoped it would.
All of screenprinting is trial and error and guesswork and taking small victories where you can in the midst of having your soul crushed over and over, and sometimes never even understanding why, so having this turn out—when I didn’t know for sure if it would—felt pretty cool.
Also, I love drawing billboards. I don’t know why I got away from that the past few years, but expect to see more of it in the future. This particular billboard—minus the Wilco & show-specific parts—lives down in Cairo, Illinois, which is a strange and ever-shrinking ghost town…I’ve been through there a couple times; it’s weird and a little sad and totally fascinating in a lot of ways. All this stuff we’ve built will melt back into the earth, and there are places where you can see it happening. right. now.
Last year, we had the opportunity to print the posters for the 2023 Telluride Bluegrass Festival—with art made by our good buddy Ken Taylor—so I was thrilled when we got asked to handle the whole thing this year. It’s happening right now as we speak over in Telluride, Colorado and the lineup is seriously nuts. We also designed some rad shirts for it…if you’re there, grab one of those and tag us in some photos…I want to see how they turned out!
For this poster, I honed in pretty hard on Bridal Veil Falls and the powerplant at the top, which overlook the valley where you’ll find the town of Telluride. It also happens to be one of the amazing views you’ll see along the Black Bear Pass, a one-way-only notorious off-road trail that I’ve had my sights on for a long time now. Someday I’ll get the guts to traverse the thing and see this spot for myself, but in the meantime, Jes and I have made this poster of it, and it was fun to have an excuse to immortalize that spot in our own way.
I sketched the whole thing out, and instead of doing our normal thing where I do all the linework and she tackles the color, I handled everything in the foreground with crisp linework and bold coloring, and she took the reins on everything off in the distance and pushing down into the valley, keeping everything way out there a bit loose, the way everything kinda softens the further away it is.
IN CLOSING BUT SORTA NOT REALLY / ONE LAST THING
Holy hell, it got long again. Oh well. Thanks for reading these things, and also a big thanks to the people who feel compelled to leave comments and/or share this stuff. It’s a weird and constant fight to get eyes on things, and I know I don’t make it any easier by making these things so long…so thanks a whole ton. And grab these prints when they go up on Monday; we would really love to ship a tube of them to your house. Or wherever you think they should go.
Oh, and I don’t totally know how Substack works…I suspect anyone reading this is already subscribed or somehow otherwise on our mailing list, but if that’s not the case, here’s a button for you to get that sorted out too:
And I dunno, lastly, just for fun…if you haven’t already spent enough time looking at a screen today, I encourage you to watch this excellent documentary about the band Joan of Arc, who I love both as a band and as human people. They spent 20 years being totally misunderstood by almost everyone who knew about them while amassing an intimidatingly prolific catalog of actual boundary-pushing music, and ended up feverishly LOVED by a handful of us weirdos. I always tell people that if there’s ever a band that’s been embedded into my DNA, it’s this one. I miss being able to see them pretty much whenever I wanted.
Also, not for nothing, there’s a bunch of my work in here. It’s mostly posters in the backgrounds of things and a couple shots of merch tables on tour, and a really cool moment where the great Devendra Banhart explores a box set I designed for Tim Kinsella (which was one of the coolest things I’ve ever gotten to make), and I’m even in there too toward the end, watching Joan of Arc play one of the best shows I’d ever seen them play to a very small crowd in a very tightly-packed tiny bar in Chicago.
Okay, that’s all for me. I’m going to get some sleep so I can hopefully drive my car on some weird roads tomorrow. Monday we’ll do that poster thing. Hope to see you there.
Thanks,
Dan