Acid Mothers Temple poster and process

Thanks for the bout of comments people. I figured I would explain some of the photos from the poster making last week. It will be too full of holes to be a working tutorial, but maybe we'll all learn something.This is the design before any printing, starting off with an ink drawing and ending up as some layers in photoshop. I'm doing all of my ink mixing by eye, so at best I'm approximating the colors.

This is the first screen with the second screen positive over the top. I think I was using the 2nd positive to help out registering the screens. I'm registering things by hand too, with the help of some home made registration tabs.

Lifting the 2nd positive off of the print reveals the first screen print.

Naked print! My virgin eyes! This is what fancypants printers call a split fountain, two colors in one screen making a nice gradient.

A close up of some of the ghosts in the bottom left. My favorite is the one making a face something like this: - <> -

A stack of prints and Marlene's feet. Hello, red clogs!

I was mixing magenta and black to make the maroon color for the second screen. I underestimated the darkness of straight cyan ink and should have gone for a darker maroon. Learning by experience... next time I should have some white ink so I can lighten my cyan.

These are gallon buckets of ink. I found three of them on sale in Syracuse for $30 but normally they're around $70. I'm predicting that I will run out of yellow and white ink faster than any other color (black will last the longest).

A little note about mixing your own colors: add your darker inks in sparingly. This goes for paint too, a little dark goes a long way. I think my ratio of magenta to yellow to get the orange I wanted for this print was around 1:20. The light green for the monotonix poster was probably around 1:15 or 1:10 (cyan to yellow). Start your mix on a small scale, using a small measure of your darker color. You can always scale up according to your ratio. But if you start out with 5 portions of cyan, you'll need to add 50 portions of yellow to get a 1:10. Keep some notes and do some math!

When I started printing the Monotonix poster I was out of newspaper to do test prints on (to get the screen ready and full with ink before printing on good paper). Yikes, what did I do? I remembered I had 5 bad Mono posters lying around so I used them as test print paper. I'm going to keep doing so for the next couple runs just to see what happens as print runs start to layer on top of each other...

A photo of the table setup, about to print screen two.

Self protection against soul invasion!

Test print of screen two on the multi-print. This is where I said to myself "Oh F. I mixed the maroon too light!" I think I started throwing black onto the screen and into the mix to try and darken it some.

A finished print on the line. Behold the wizard! Soul spitting, eel wrangling, demon twisting prints! If you look close you can see the cyan/maroon overprint that I wasn't expecting. But, now that I know it's to be expected. Learning again!

More prints on the line, maybe the same print and it's neighbors. I missed the Mono show and I'm hoping to make it to see Acid Mothers Temple. I haven't seen them live and I have a feeling they really tear it open in person.

A close up of the multi-print before I printed the Acid Mothers Temple poster over it. The wolf brain mix was pretty cool but I think it got mostly obscured by an eel or some wizard hair. Such is life, randomly obscured by eels and wizard hair.

Thanks for reading (if anybody does.) Peace!