It’s the Son Of More process shots of a poster I designed for the Melvins Lite @melvinsdotcom show at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Process:

Here are the last of the photos I’ll post.
After I’m done inking I’ll erase the surface of any unwanted pencils that are still hanging out from the pencil stage of the drawing. I use a kneaded eraser because it won’t affect the surface and fade the inks. If you use too much pressure when erasing you’ll lift the thinner areas of the ink off the paper. And then it looks kinda crappy after you scan it. You wanna have a slow hand and an easy touch…

I used an epson 10000XL scanner. Set it to grayscale and scanned at 600dpi. The scanner is kinda pricey but if you save up here and there (like I did) you’ll be very happy with your investment. Buy a couple less beers or hold off on all the ironic tattoos. This thing has outlived 4 computers so far. (Sadly none of that impresses the ladies.) I work on 11x17 bristol and don’t hafta scan it in 2 pieces. It saves me time and headache trying to noodle things together and losing hours in the process. I don’t miss those days.

At this point I drop it into photoshop and clean up whatever stray eraser bit or leftover pencils remains on the bristol. I try to not spend more than 15 minutes doing this. Keep in mind when you scan at such a high res you’re seeing a shit load of detail. Detail that isn’t visible once printed. So try to not get hung up on seeing every little fault. Just concentrate on what will be visible at the printed size. For me it’s 18x24. Everything else shouldn’t matter. I finish up by saving the file as a bitmap tiff at 50% threshold. Real simple formula.

Once the file is saved I drop it into illustrator. I size it to 18x24 and start adding the anatomical detail and lines. I had taken care of the text and color scheme early on so now I don’t hafta worry about it.

Once I’m done with the text and everything is in place I then export each color as a grayscale tif and open them up in photoshop. There I’ll make sure my color seps are so fresh and so clean…clean. I work in channels cuz that’s what I was told to do but it is also easier to soft-proof how the colors will print. It helps if you have a PMS book. I “spot” or “Call out” specific colors and request that the printer use those. Some printers will try to match what they see on their computer screens. The thing is their screen might be calibrated different from yours. So when I use PMS colors I’m 99.9% more likely to get the colors I imagined.

Another thing to consider is your bleeds. I let the lineart bleed from 5-10 pixels depending on how thick the trapping artwork is. You can see that in the last photo. In case the paper expands or contracts the registration won’t be horribly off.

Ok stick a for in me…I’m done.

The Melvins print will go up on my site sometime tomorrow. The best way to find out when is by signing up to my nerdsletter on my site. I’m getting flooded (no pun) with emails and am telling everyone the same thing - sign up for the newsletter. They’ll be made available to those folks first.