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.
Posted in Art, music, poster
Tagged album, Art, bear, beverly, boston, caspian, cd, deluxe bundle, hand pulled, kris johnsen, moon, new, packaging, poster, screen print, silk screen, trees, vinyl, waking season
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