Bread and Puppet posters are printed, Jim at Black Cat cropped the edges for me, and they are going up around town.

stages:

[that horse!]

finished poster (in a sloppily composited image) after the break. (more…)

Right now I’m working on quickly printing a poster for Bread & Puppet, the legendary puppet theater company. They will be performing all over Providence during the third week in October…

I was initially commissioned to draw this poster myself, but the decision was made that I would adapt and print a drawing by Peter Schumann, Bread & Puppet’s equally legendary founder/patriarch. (As one of my housemates put it, “He’s a 70-plus-year-old guy who gets up on 12-foot stilts. Is there anything more to be said?”) We had already ordered the paper, so we sent Peter a sample sheet and he sent us back a rough line drawing in a single thick weight of Sharpie marker. When I opened the tube the marker was still fresh; the smell of the ink was strong. His note on the back: “Have fun! Put colors as you like!” I’ve been excited about the chance to match his messiness with a little bit of carefulness, but also with my own messiness.

First step: to the photocopier to transfer different parts of his drawings to transparency. Next: chopping them up ruthlessly with the knife:

I inverted some of the photocopies, because I want the shapes inside the lines to print, instead of the lines themselves. These letters have been cut out of their backgrounds:

[the paper is behind it, it’s more or less this color!]

After another trip back to the copy place (to fill in stuff that I had missed the first time), the poster layout has been taped down to a board, and (more…)