Beirut print… 9:30 club, DC

Beirut is coming in town for 2 nights and I was able to work with them to create a print for their show at the 930 Club.  They are a band I got into early on and actually one of my early posters I worked on was for them back in 2006 at the Great American Hall in San Francisco.  I was a big fan of their 1st album that had just come out so I was excited for the show.  I think they were all 18 at the time or even younger and the show as a bit brutal.  Kinda sloppy and they were all very “young” and experiencing being on stage for the 1st time in front of huge crowds it seemed.  Kinda left me bummed.  A number of albums and time have passed and they are definitely on top of their game.

I noticed alot of the imagery used for this band (posters, shirts, whatever..) tended to be the same kind of vibe and I wanted to bring something drawing from their New Mexico background and mix in a bit of a trippy Hopi Indian-kachina doll look to it.  The colors on the final print came out looking great.

18′ x 24′, …… 4-color print……. 150 print run…  and is available in the store now.

KRS-One video, “Aztechnical”. Behind-the-scenes .. sort of.

The great KRS-One is releasing his 12th album, Just Like That on Jan. 4th 2012 and after months of delay has released a 1st video from the album, “Aztechnical“. The story goes, last year when I was living in Atlanta my friend Corey Ellis got the gig to do the video and what he was given was pretty bare-bones and essentially he had to create the video from scratch.

In typical KRS fashion the song is pretty dense, as it is 6-minutes long and sounds like someone reading a textbook. Not the easiest thing to create or keep interesting to a viewer. The gist of the song is that it is about Cortez taking advantage of the Aztecs and the end of Mayan calendar and possible the end of life as we know it. Pretty light stuff.

He asked if I could create some artwork for the video and I leapt at the chance, since Ive been a fan of KRS-One for a while. I created a bunch of Aztec & Mayan style line drawings to be used in the background and my girlfriend & her sister were employed to be Mayan women. To find the perfect jungle type setting we looked no further than our horrible unkept backyard. Torches were made out of rags covered in vaseline, the girls were painted up, proper lights were setup and Corey filmed. All the KRS-One stuff was green screened.

I said this was “behind-the-scenes” sort of because my inclusion was tiny and the real behind the scenes would be alot of Corey sitting at his computer essentially creating the whole video. In the end, I think it came out looking great.

For more of Corey Ellis’s work, check out his website, T-bolt Films.

Gene Ween @ New Hope Winery print…

Once again I have had the pleasure of working with one of my favorite bands, Ween.  In this case half of the band to be exact, for a show in their hometown New Hope, PA.  Gene Ween will be playing with fellow Ween’r Dave Dreiwitz on bass and there is talk of cello accompaniment.   This poster goes out to a special breed of person that knows that “Dragon’s Breath” is a kind of saving throw and has spent too much time reading of the exploits of Raistlin Majere.

This print is 18′ x 24′, …… 5-color print…….  and is available in the store now.

So break out your copy of “The Mollusk” and your 20-sided dice and nerd out until then.