Wilco Poster Process.
Please indulge us in a little process post for The Silent P’s latest poster art created for the amazing band Wilco.
For those with shorter attention spans, below is the entire process represented in a handy image gallery. Below the gallery is a more expansive detailed description of the process. We’d like to thank Dan at Crosshair in Chicago for always delivering an amazingly sharp and accurate print. He’s pretty smart when it comes to print – and by ‘pretty smart’, we mean GENIUS. We hope you enjoy this “Behind-the-scenes” post!
– The Silent P
The creative process really starts by researching several things relating to the show’s location, the history of the area, or the history of the venue as well. In this case, Norfolk is known as a port city with a rich sailing history. Gotta love nautical themes! We let that percolate a bit, start sketching some concepts, many that may not make the final cut or approval. Notice this concept sketch is “pre-bottling” the ship…
Next we develop the approved concept sketch a bit tighter for client approval, then it’s off to the inking stage…For this illustration we opted to use the style of stippling, endless dots to create and build up the ship image. Stippling is the creation of a pattern simulating varying degrees of solidity or shading by using small dots…and most your patience.
We then place numerous elements into the image editing program once they have either been scanned or found…Building the scene out in Photoshop…
Once the art is approved as “GO!”, all the colors involved are created as ‘color seps’ (color separations). Crop and bleed marks are your (and your printer’s) friend…these assure accurate color registration during the printing process when ink hits the paper…and if they don’t, then start over.
Once all the color seps are accurate with any added bleeds, trapping or knock outs, the next step is burning the silk screens for each color…
Now it’s time to color match, thanks to Pantone Color Matching System and a keen eyeball…or two.
From left to right, we see the matched colors being laid down from each screen to eventually form the entire image…Sorry ladies, Dan’s married.
…aaaaaand TA-DA, a hot off the press, true-to-life limited edition screen print. Thanks for sticking around on this one, hope you enjoyed it.
Oh hey, purchase one here won’t you! Limited quantities available…