TRPS collaboration poster with Marq Spusta…… “The Spunig Tree”.

One of my favorite shows to do every year is TRPS Festival of Rock Posters in San Francisco. The folks who put it on are the best and I have been doing it since I started doing poster back in 2006 or so. As a fan of posters myself I have gotten to meet some of the my idols who were the a big part of the original 1960’s Bill Graham Fillmore scene (Wes Wilson, Lee Conklin, etc..). The show really is a fan service and every year they produce a print to help raise money, in this case for the “TRPS Artist Relief Trust”.

Buddy Marq Spusta & I have been talking about doing a collaborative print for years and figured this was the perfect opportunity. Our handdrawn styles are somewhat similar, sometimes he goes a bit looser… sometimes I cleaner, but we figured the imagery would mesh well. For the process we sent some sketches back and forth making the 2 eyeball characters the initial focus.

The obvious development was to make the overall image resemble a face but the problem was pulling it off without trying too hard. For the actual artwork, we ended up drawing the different elements of the poster individually, eventually piecing them together like a big puzzle.

Monolith Press did a great job printing them up and we gave 100 copies of the original gold to TRPS to sell at the show which I think they pretty much ran through. Marq & I kept a couple as well as some variants (Silver, Blue, Foil & Super awesome Sparkle Foil) which we sold at the show. I will have a limited amount (20 copies) of the Original “Gold” print for sale. I’ll be putting up 15… and holding 5 for a later date.

In regards to variants,…I have about 1 of each I will be putting up for sale. I am not sure how I will sell these at this point without it being a complete mess and people saying they didn’t get a chance. I might just put them up on eBay. We’ll see….