The first step was to build the frame. The frames were put together, and then the screen was stapled onto the frame so that it was really tight on the frame.

I forgot to take a picture, but after we built our frame we applied a thin layer of photo emulsion onto our silkscreen. While we waited for the emulsion to dry, we took a walk to Katari on Elgin Street and got our designs printed on an acetate sheet.

The next step was to prepare the positive. We placed our acetate sheet on top of our silkscreen, and let it sit under the light for approximately 12 minutes. This made is so that the areas that are not hit by the light (i.e. the black parts on the acetate) will become soft and washable afterwards.

This is what the screen looks like after the baking. The light green area is then washed off using lukewarm water, leaving behind only the baked emulsion in the areas that were transparent on the acetate sheet.

Next, we let the screens sit in front a fan for a bit to let it dry.

The screen is now complete and ready for printing! YEAH!!! Really impressed at how smooth and accurate it turned out.

I went nuts and started printing on all sorts of materials. I started off with white ink on pink cloth, and I think it looked awesome. Good to know for when I make t-shirts in the future.

I then tried white ink on a black shirt. Looks rad, if I may say so myself! I’m starting to like the ‘negative’ version of the Move Your Mountain logo more than the original :)

I made my mark on Spins and Needle’s communal tarp as well. The blue brain design is my friend Grant Lucas’ bad-ass design, which also turned out awesome!

Overall I was extremely happy with the way my screen turned out, and had a blast at the workshop. I was worried that I might mess up my screen somehow, but I was surprised to learn that it’s pretty hard to mess up a screen. I found myself a new hobby, and I’m definitely going to be making more designs. I’ll be using this Move Your Mountain screen for future merch as well (tees, prints, tote bags, etc.). Big thanks to Melanie from Spins and Needles for organizing and teaching at this workshop – you were awesome!

This workshop runs monthly, so I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn how to silkscreen and make their own unique screen in the process.

Inspiration:

I looked at a lot of American posters from World War II for inspiration. I’ve always loved propaganda posters, especially how they make everything sound really imperative. I also liked how they mixed sans-serif fonts with script fonts.

Overall I think I was able to pull off a pretty legit-looking propaganda poster. It was a good exercise for learning blend modes as well.

THE END

This year I attended Flash In The Can 2011, a conference in Toronto on Design and Technology. I was always under the impression that this conference was mostly about Flash, but my friend Grant Lucas convinced me otherwise. He went to FITC last year, and told me how it was more about design, workflow, and inspiration, and little to do with Flash. This got me thinking about going to FITC 2011, but when he told me that McBess (one of my favourite artists in the world) was going to be doing a talk I immediately booked tickets to the conference.

In this post I’m going to talk about the three speakers that resonated with me the most.

Signalnoise (James White)

On the first day, I attended a talk by James White of Signalnoise called “Back to the Future II”. In his talk, James talked about how his past experiences and childhood memories has affected his artwork. James was really into heavy metal and old TV opening titles with funky colors, and you can really see that in his bright-colored, retro art.

James really emphasized how he made almost all of the artwork in his spare time, outside of work. This really got me thinking about how important is for me to keep working on art on my free time. Now that I’m finished school for good and back full-time at work, I have no excuse to put art projects aside. I felt that I really need to keep pumping out projects in order to improve my artistic skills.

Robert Hodgin

Robert Hodgin showed off some of the coolest generative art I’ve ever seen in my life. It was cool to how he’d look at things in nature, like a tree or a beach, and think of ways to reproduce it with code. He talked about some of his past projects, the challenges he faced, and how he overcame them. My favourite project of his was called “Into the Woods”, which was an audio-visual piece that he created with cellist Zoë Keating. The entire experience, including the sky, trees, grass, etc. is created with code, and is absolutely beautiful. I highly recommend checking out his project here.

Robert too talked about his past and how it influenced him. He recalled a time when he was a toddler, he was climbing Mount Fuji and he remembered being surrounded by tall trees and mist. This experience was the basis for many of his projects, including “Into the Woods”. However, it turned out that this memory was completely false, and that he was actually just at a small park in Tokyo :P

Near the end of his presentation, Robert showed off “Planetary”, an iPad app that he and his colleagues at Bloom Studio Inc. have been working on. Planetary is an app that takes your iPad’s music library, and dynamically generates a solar system based on your collection. For example, the textures of the planets are created using an artist’s album cover. For those who have an iPad, be sure to check it out on the App Store.

Generative art is something I’d definitely like to experiment with, although I severely lack in the programming skill department. I’ll start off with small particle effects projects using Processing, and then move on to using the Cinder library.

McBess (Matthieu Bessudo)

Last but not least, McBess! I’ve been a big fan of McBess’ work ever since a few years ago I saw his music video, Wood. I’ve always loved old cartoons as a kid, and love artists that use that style in their work.

I totally thought McBess made “Wood” for a band called Dead Pirates, but what I found out during the presentation was that the song was made and recorded by McBess alone, and the Dead Pirates was a fictional band with imaginary characters. Later, he formed a band with his buddies called Dead Pirates with whom he plays live shows, but it’s interesting to see how the fictional band came before the actual band.

I enjoyed seeing McBess’ projects and learning about his workflow, but what really got to me was his awesome sense of humor. He just seemed to be a really down-to-earth dude, and his slides would frequently include references to boobies and ‘wanking’. I chatted with him briefly after his presentation, and he was kind enough to answer some questions that I had for him.

Like the fanboy that I am, I got my friend to take a picture of me and McBess. To further emphasize my fanboyness I decided to wear my Dead Pirates tee that day.

Conclusion

From these three awesome individuals, I learned the following:

• Think about what excited you as a kid, and think of ways to integrate those experiences into your own work.
• Always seek inspiration. Appreciate your surroundings (places, events, people, music, etc.) and harness them into your own work.
• Don’t be afraid to try something because it’s not “original”. James White and McBess openly talked about their influences, and how it’s okay to be influenced by others. Standing on the shoulder of giants, so to speak.
• Don’t procrastinate. Keep making artwork to improve.

FITC 2011 was a blast, and I’m really glad I attended this year. I went in with little idea on what to expect, and left with a mind packed with inspiration and a stomach full of butterflies. I would definitely go back next year, if I can somehow cheat into getting a student pass ;)

Thanks again Grant for letting me know about FITC, and Shopify for letting me take time off to attend.

Inspiration

The “Meekrab” logo that I remember seeing from Harold and Kumar was my biggest inspiration. I never really knew what the Meekrab logo was for (according to Urban Dictionary, it’s for a band formed by the directors of H&K) but I always thought it was cool and memorable.

The Process

I first started with a simple sketch. In fact, I drew this really quickly on the bus in my notebook.

I later scanned the doodle, and brought it in to Photoshop. The sketch was far from perfect, but the idea was there. Basically I wanted a Mountain-Man with his arms in the air, with the text “MyM” below it. I needed the design to be in a circle because the first thing I wanted to do was make pins.

With the scanned image in a locked layer in Photoshop, I started tracing the image with the Pen Tool. I like to first trace the shape of the outer silhouette in black, and then create another shape inside it in white. This allows me to easily tweak the thickness of the lines afterwards by adjusting the curves and anchor points of the shapes.

The arms and the outline of the body were the first thing that I traced. I then created a white shape for the inner body, and this gave the body a nice black outline.

Next, details such as the eyes, mouth, and the text were added. In the same way as I did before, I created the outer shape first and filled in the inside afterwards. For example, for the mouth I drew the shape first and then filled it with a series of white triangles to form the teeth.

Below is the first version of the design. The arms and letters look weird, and when scaled down it looked like pure garbage. Absolutely disgusting, but hey, it’s an iterative process :P

The second was a big improvement. The lines were thicker, and I made sure everything was more symmetrical (like the eyes and the teeth). I was still unsatisfied with the arms though; to me they still looked too flimsy and weak.

The End Product

For the final version I gave the arms a bigger arc so that they look stronger, and threw in some Sign of Horns for maximum bad-assery. I applied a grunge texture on top to add a bit of texture. I like how there are three lightning bolts, since there are three of us in the band (I totally didn’t just realize this now *shifty eyes*).

Finally, I sent my design over to the awesome folks at Crucial Pins so that they can make some pins for us. The pins arrived only 2 days after I ordered them – I was pleasantly surprised by their fast service. Mountain-Man looked damn fine on shiny silver paper too.

Eventually when we have more band money we plan on making t-shirts with this design, and also screenprint it on Chris’ bass drum skin.

THE END

The idea for Boomi spawned from a picture of a boom box that I saw on Flickr. The boom box kind of reminded me of a robot head, so I started doodling on my notepad. After a few sketches, I decided to use him for a music video project that I had to do for Audio/Video class back in 2007. His debut was in the following music video (WARNING: my animation skills are laughable).

I was pretty satisfied with the music video, but I felt that I could further develop Boomi as a character. In summer 2008, I decided to make Boomi into a physical product, with the magic of papercraft. I felt that papercraft was the perfect medium to turn Boomi into a physical product because A) Boomi has a very 'boxy' shape, which is ideal for papercraft, and B) papercraft is cheap. Another reason why I wanted to make Boomi into a physical was that I wanted to create my own 'designer toy' - kind of like a poor man's Munny doll ;)

I started off by drawing many sketches of what the new-and-improved Boomi might look like. I drew many different versions of Boomi in different angles and shapes, keeping in mind that I have to make him simple to make with paper. Unfortunately I seem to have lost almost all of my sketches - the scan above is one of the few I could find.

I then created blueprints for Boomi and started to build some prototype models. I experimented with different sizes, shapes, and proportions, until I was 100% satisfied. I used scrap paper for all prototypes in order to minimize the waste of paper. The trickiest part was coming up with a way to make the head. I learned that it's not very easy to create a box with paper, because the paper is usually too flimsy to close off the final edge (I'm sorry, it's a little difficult to explain in words, but it's actually pretty tricky building a box out of thin paper).

Shown above are pictures of the version 1.0 release of Boomi. Although I am very satisfied with the look-and-feel of Boomi, I feel that I can still improve on the blueprint, and make him easier to build. In the upcoming weeks, I plan on creating improved and simpler blueprints for Boomi.

Please click here to download the blueprints for Boomi v.1.0. Boomi currently comes in 4 flavours: Yellow, Mocha, Pink, and Blank.