I had the pleasure of making a poster for ArtCrankSf this year, and I wanted to share the work and process with you guys. The guys over at Vahalla Studios printed the posters for me. Dan was really rad to work with and I highly recommend getting any of your screen printing work done with them. Not only are they top notch screen printers but they are some of the best creatives our there.

I decided to draw the lion cyclist because my son Townes loves lions. However, for some reason I wanted to make a character that was the king of the mission and that meant a cigarette and a basket full of booze. It was kind of funny to me how i ended up with this final piece. Originally I wanted to do something kind of titillating and or shocking. I figured whats better about biking in the city than the super sexy tattooed chicks on fixies. I thought it would be fun to draw a ridiculously idealized version of that (sketch below). Unfortunately time wasn’t on my side as the turnaround for these posters is pretty fast, and I needed to find a direction that matched my time constraints.

Above is the sexy chick concept. Of course she would have to have a dog in a basket, and she is riding in front of dolores park. You can see that some of the concepts such as the booze basket and cigarette smoking carried over to the lion piece. Also the city scene background stayed. I’m sure i’ll whip this piece up soon because its still bouncing around in my head.

Another concept i thought would be fun is a dick bike (above). I’m not sure why dick jokes are so funny to me, but they seem to enter into my work here and there. I thought it would be fun to do a wolf or dog like creature who’s penis actually made up the bike frame that he rode. I thought it would also be funny if he had a bitchy stylish cat to ride in his basket. The metaphors for this piece come from a lot of weird and funny stories I’ve heard. I ditched the piece because i ended up questioning the value of the concept. I was listening to a Tom Waits interview the other day and he was speaking about questioning the validity of his style. He wondered if he were truly eccentric or if he just wore a funny hat. I had the same feelings with the piece. Is it weird just to be weird? Thats just not good enough anymore.

Here is an example of the digital piece with some slight color variations and more subtlety to the texture. The limitations of screen-printing simplified some of the complexities of the texture, but i think its interesting to see the difference between the two.

Wow that was a lot said about a simple poster. I hope you found it interesting to some degree.