Michael Sieben details a 3 week silk screen project at The Decoder Ring Design Concern in Austin.
Hello fecalface. It's been quite some time since my last diary entry. I have some good excuses for not posting anything in so long though. Like uh... I was super busy and uh... I got the shingles... and uh... I had some yard work to do. But I have a backstock of photos and stories now so I'll probably be posting more frequently in the upcoming months. At least more frequently than not at all.

I spent some time in Northern California this Summer.

Working on a crazy ass project with Adidas. I kept waiting for somebody to realize they were spending a bunch of money making a film about some skate nerd from Texas. Nobody seemed to notice though. Which was cool.

I got to hang out with one of my favorite drinking buddies while I was in CA.

Always a good time with that dude.

I went to a carnival at some point during the Summer too.

It's good to freak out sometimes.

But the main focus of this blog is a screen print project that I worked on here in Austin this Summer with the dudes from The Decoder Ring Design Concern.

They do a series of fine art prints with artists that they invite to Austin. I already live in Austin so I didn't have to fly anywhere to participate in the project. Which is cool because if you've flown anywhere recently you know that the airlines have pretty much thrown in the towel in terms of customer service. "Oh, your flight was delayed fifteen hours? Sucks for you. Next."

Anyway, the Decoder Ring dudes are really into pushing the boundaries of what a screen print can look like (and even feel like.)

They wanted to work with me on developing a screen print that incorporated the same subtleties that my paintings have. Things like under-painting, stains, pencil marks, etc.

It was super cool working hand and hand with them to come up with solutions on how to build up a screen printed image that looked like a painting vs. a flat print.

We decided to take the computer out of the equation all together and hand draw everything to size (vs. scanning a smaller drawing at a high resolution and blowing it up.)

All of the color separations were done by hand as well by using acetate and registration decals.

Uh... they had inks there.

You can see the stain effect on those prints there. We mixed actual coffee in with the ink so that it would look like as close as possible to the stains on my actual paintings.

Mountain separation detail.

Make a ninja joke or something like that.

Just thought I'd have a better chance of John putting this up on the site if I included this photo.

They had some really cool old graphic design tools where we were printing. This stuff is called "Pounce" and you can rub it on Acetate to give the surface more tooth so you can draw on it easier.

This stuff is called Lone Star and you can rub it in your mouth to give you a headache. A delicious headache.

This is Paul Fucik. He pretty much rules. He and I spent about two and a half weeks together working on this print.

I was really stoked with how the print turned out. We used over twenty screens in the production and I think the final product really looks more like a painting than a screen print. We even printed a coating of wax over the mountains to give the paper a cool texture. If you want to check out the printing process, check out the Decoder Ring's site. They have a cool step by step feature where you can see how all of the layers were built up.

So that concludes this blog. Now go climb into a shirt with one of your buddies and have some fun. It is September after all. {moscomment}

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