CASPIAN – Asia and Australia 2014 Tour Tshirt

My good friends in the band CASPIAN are currently on a tour of Asia and Australia. As I understand this is the first time they are going to a lot of these places. They were kind enough to ask me to design a Tshirt for the tour including dates on the back and all! I actually submitted 6 or 7 designs to them but this is the one that we went with! I really enjoyed some of the other designs so they might see the light of day at some point in the near future but probably not as a band tshirt.

I do not have any of these shirts. they are only available through the band on tour and possibly after.

Dates on the back of the shirt.

I found this picture on Instagram of a fan who bought the shirt. My first view of an actual printed shirt since they were printed halfway around the world. Sorry for stealing your photo for my blog.

Caspian – Waking Season screen printed poster

This past month I had the pleasure of designing a smaller 12in.-12in. screen printed poster for the band Caspian‘s new full length record “Waking Season’ to be released on Triple Crown Records. The only way to get the poster is by pre-ordering their deluxe bundle of the new record. The bundle includes, 180 gram 2xLP on black vinyl. Gatefold jacket. Includes digital download card. (Only 300 will be pressed). Waking Season digipak CD. DIY Music Box w/ “Waking Season” pre-punched strip & bonus strip. Waking Season T-Shirt. 11×17″ (Folded) Waking Season album release poster and the print I made pictured above.

The poster was is a 3 color hand puled screen printed poster, printed in Portland, ME on 140lb. black speckletone French Paper. The design is based off of Instant Polaroid pictures I’ve taken the past year with my different Polaroid Land Cameras using Fuji Film. The only real guidelines I had for this poster design was to base the art off of the music how ever I wanted and to possibly try something new that I had no ever done with printing or designing before. I don’t usually ever work with straight photos in my work and it I do it’s a very small amount, I only like to when they are photos of my own and not found images. I’m by no means a photographer but in the past year or so I’ve found a new love of instant photography and realizing how similar in a way it is to burning a silk screen with photo emulsion, your basically using the same kind of photo chemicals. It’s also allowed me to search new forms of art making and just having fun taking physical pictures of my life.
When designing this I took in consideration that this was not going to be a gig poster where it should usually have larger text and more of an advertisement for a show or event. This is more of a “hold in your hands” kind of poster where the digital version does not matter very much, it’s all about opening up this record and holding this small screen printed thing in your hands. I chose to use a much thicker paper then I usually use and one of the colors printed is black ink on black paper, because the paper is not a perfect pitch black you can see the black print very well but its not as noticeable as the other layers. It was a bit of a toss up between the black ink and doing a glow-in-the-dark layer but let’s be honest, almost all of the glow poster’s I’ve ever seen are not as cool as you think they would be. Dan McCarthy is really the only person who pulls off glow-in-the-dark posters well.
I’m very excited to finally hear this whole record start to finish and am beyond psyched to have this little part in the packaging of this record. Caspian has been a favorite band of mine since a friend from Beverly, MA turned me on to them in school and then later I booked them at a venue I work at in Portland, ME which is still my favorite show ever seeing their along with Arms and Sleepers and The Baltic Sea. Please go see these fellas live and pick up the new record! All that info can be found on their site here.
Below you can find a few process shots and initial photo scans of the creating of this poster.

 

Last Night On Earth Posters

Here it is! The finished printed poster for Radar Recordings & Extinguish Boston‘s 9th Annual Last Night On Earth show with Caspian, Defeater, Constants & Dreamtigers.

Above is a video of the whole process of making this poster. Filmed, edited and printed by myself. I hope you like it!

The poster measures 18in.-24in. Is printed on Black Licorice French Paper. Has an edition of 112. Signed and numbered, 3 Color print.

I’m very happy with the outcome of this poster and am really excited to have a little part in this show. These will go on sale for the first time the night of the show for a super low $10 price tag, and if any are left they will be for sale at my Etsy Store afterwords. I also have a small artist edition with no text available at my store now.

*UPDATE: These are for sale right now at my Store.*

Big thanks to Ben Hoffman at Extinguish for hooking me up as always! And thanks to David Zwickerhill for the above photo and Craig Hardin and Meagan Anderson for helping me print.

Last Night On Earth Poster sneak peek!

Here’s the first look at some process into this poster. Much more to come!

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9th Annual Last Night On Earth Poster design

Click on the image for a much larger view.

For the 2nd year in a row I’ve had the pleasure of designing Radar Recordings & Extinguish’s Last Night On Earth at the Middle East Rock Club in Cambridge, Mass. This will be my 3rd year attending and have had a great time both times going. You can view last years poster here. This year Caspain, Defeater, Constants and Dreamtigers perform, Should be a really fun night! View all the show info here.

This years poster will be a limited edition 18in.-24in screen print using 3 different colors on Black paper. They will be printing in the coming weeks. I’m very happy with the turnout of this poster. Much like last year I’ve incorporated some lyrics of one of the bands and tryed to bring up some sort of dialogue between it and the imagery. Again I’ll probably make it down for this show and be selling these bad boys at the merch table for a super low price! More on that later.

Last Night on Earth show

The other night I drove down to Cambridge with my girlfriend Jess to deliver some posters for the Last Night On Earth show at the Middle East. It was one of the best shows I have been to in a long time! Great bands, got to hang out with some old and new friends, sold a bunch of posters and got to eat some falafel. Also picked up a massive amount of paper to print some new old Arms and Sleepers records, I’m very excite about this! There will also be a new Arms and Sleeper’s poster done by me released very soon.

Thanks to Ben Hoffman again, Moving Mountains for being awesome merch. buddies and all the bands and people i met this past Thursday night. Hope to see you all again soon. I also got a bunch of people from the night to sign the #1 poster from the edition, this will definitely be going on my wall!
There are only a few posters left, so if your interested in getting one I still have them up at my Etsy Store.

All of these photos were taken by Dan Gonyea over at Future Breed. I’ve been going to this kids website for a while to check out photo’s from the New England area music scene, I suggest you do the same! Check out the photos from the rest of the show here.

I hope everyone who attended the show got some free buttons! I still have some left so if you buy something from my Etsy store at all you will get some extra ones of these!

8th Annual Last Night On Earth Process Post

Here’s the process post for my Last Night On Earth show poster for Caspian, Constants Irepress and Moving Mountains. The show is tomorrow at The Middle East in Boston. I’ll be driving down tomorrow to bring these guys to the show to sell. They will be for sale for a super low price and hopefully wont have to bring any back to Portland. Well, just for those few people who wont be able to make it to the show I do have them for sale at my Etsy Store right now!
This poster ended up being a 7 color screen print. measures 20in.-26in. and is printed Chocolate colored French paper. An edition of about 90 and are all signed and numbered. I will also have about 10 art prints from this posted at a later date. I’m really proud of this print, the design and the printing quality of it plus just being able to be part of a show this awesome! I hope if your in the area tomorrow you will come check out these bands, they deserve everything they get!
I usually don’t talk to much about the concept of these posters, but I will a little bit here. Basically the whole idea came from myself having to drive home this past Thanksgiving to New Hampshire where my family lives, and taking a train back home at the end of it. I probably listened to Caspian the whole time both ways on these 2 hour trips and I dont know if you have ever driven to NH from ME. But you see a lot of trees and woods, and my mom also lived in the middle of 120 acres of woods back home, I’ve grown up in those woods and have walked them a million times. So the woods comes from back home and being surrounded by these woods. I’ve also been very interested in certain wildlife lately, bears being on top. So I tried to create some kind of narrative between the trees/woods and this bear in them.
When first thinking of ideas for this poster I chose to stay away from the outer Space kind of reference the “Last Night On Earth” name gave me. I’m not sure if that’s what it is suppose to mean, but that’s what came to me first, along with other poster’s I have seen from past events.
So after coming up with some idea the narrative aspect came in. It’s left a little open, because there is not a story written on the poster or other pictures to go along with it. I view this bear being in a very cold looking forest, probably just about to be winter and it needs to find somewhere to hibernate and is looking for food that is no where to be seem. The bears face in the circle is most likely the same bear as the walking one, but actually after drawing both of them I like to view them as maybe not even being the same bear. I guess that is up to you. Maybe he is going to be killing something in the close up shot, or maybe he is about to face something.
The Moving Mountain’s lyric written on the poster also adds to this story. This song came on after listening to Caspian on this ride home and seems to just ‘make sense’ at that very moment. I feel like it adds the tree’s in as a character in this story.
I’m really happy with how this was built and that I hope people get something more out of it than just another attractive image with a bands name on it. I really want to explore doing this with all my prints.

Big thanks to Ben Hoffman & Philip Jamieson for hooking me up! Also to Caspian, Constants, Irepress & Moving Mountains, some of the best bands around! I’m also excited to get back to the Middle East, I love that place!

Here’s the first 3 layers of hand drawn tree’s.

The first one with the bear. Using oiled paper for transparencies.

The very first layer of blue.

8th Annual Last Night On Earth show in Cambridge, Mass.

I’m very lucky to be doing this poster for Radar Recordings and Extinguish Boston’s 8th Annual Last Night On Earth show in Cambridge, Mass at the Middle East. This show features Caspian, Constants, Irepress & Moving Mountains. This is the final digital version which in the next few days will be turned into a 5 color screen print to be sold the night of the show. Please keep checking back for more updates.
Below is a detail shot of the bear in the circle with a lyric around it and also below that are 3 hand drawn layers of color that will be all layed on top of eachother and printed, in different colors than black of course. All of these papers are drawn to scale so they are 18″-24″ big. I’ve been drawing my posters at the exact size they will be printed latly, more time intensive but a lot more detail will come out in the final piece.

New Track from Lavinia

New Track from this new band called Lavinia featuring current & former members of Caspian, Eksi Ekso and The Burning Paris. I’m pretty into it! Check out the first track here.

Tapes Print

Just finished up an edition of 50 Tapes Prints, This is the same print as the ted Leo posters I did a few months ago except with no show information. So you dont have to be a huge Ted Leo or Screaming Females fan to pick this one up!

I also started drawing on the first 20 prints in the edition on one of the tapes with some of my favorite local(ish) bands! I may even do more after I post this!

These will be available at Picnic which is next Saturday the 28th in Portland, Maine. And will shortly be available at my ETSY store.

Some examples of the hand drawn tapes after the printing process!