I’ve always had an affinity for old fairy tales and Snow white is an old one, and I’m sure most of you remember the Disney adaptation. For the most part Disney did a great job telling the story because they were a lot more artistic and had more freedom back then. But as is the case with most old tales, it is hard to beat the Grimm Brothers version. It is downright creepy at parts which is the vibe I really wanted to capture with this print.

I would give you some more background on the Grimm version of the story but nothing beats just reading it for yourself. So I’ve gone ahead and posted it in all of its glory (what up public domain) so settle in and read it here.

18×24 inch 3 color screenprint.

I have been a fan of Metric for a long time now. In this day and age of free music and torrents, there aren’t many bands left that I rush out to buy records from, but Metric is one of those bands for me. When I heard they were finally going to come through Nashville, I was going to do the poster one way or another. Their lyrics are chalk full of great imagery for posters, but one song that always stood out to me was “Stadium Love” the closing track off of their album Fantasies. So I started sketching, made some sweet icons in adobe illustrator, went on a copy and paste frenzy, added in a hand drawn rendition of their band logo, and done. My buddy Craig Moan who is also a great illustrator and designer here in nashville came over to help me pull some prints and trouble shoot some ink issues (screen printing fluorescent pink on black paper doesn’t work well so we switched to super opaque gold at the last minute ).

The show was great, and packed. I couldn’t believe how many people turned out for he show. And the posters that we brought to the show sold in a snap, which is always a good feeling.

I have been listining to Stars new album the five ghosts religously for the past month. So I was super excited when I heard that they were coming through town and that I got to do a poster for the show. I have also been obsessed with old astrological art for some time now and I knew that I wanted to do a poster based on old star chart illustrations from the 1800s. I started looking more and more into astrological illustrations and found this site that has all of Alexander Jamison’s star charts archived, and those were a huge inspiration. Everyone should take a look at them here, some of them are astonishing.

So after I dug through those and found some interesting subject matter, I headed over to the GigPoster.com archives just to make sure I wasn’t duplicating anything that had been done for the band in the past, then I started sketching. You can see some of the highlights from my sketchbook over to the right. Once sketching was done I worked out how I wanted to present the art and what kind of backgrounds were going to work. I tried a lot of different things and eventually landed with the one that seemed the most obvious (photo of a far off galaxy), some times I arrive at the most obvious solution last.

The show itself was pretty incredible. the band put a lot of thought into the production and sound of their live show and they really brought it that night. Tons of lights, flower petals, bubbles, you name it. I was blown away by how well their songs translated to live performance and they played material all the way back to their early album Heart. What a good night.

Or you can just cut to the chase:

BoreUs

The Island Galaxy

-Peace unto thee

I have also uploaded some new images to the posters and illustrations sections of my portfolio so be sure to check those out. For those of you that have been emailing me about my book “how tragic”, fear not, for howtragic.com will be launching in the next week or two.

Disclaimer: this section of the post is for those of you that want to know or care about the other details of snowcatpress3.0. So besides plugging in all of my code into wordpress (which I use the starkers blank theme by elliot jay stocks, in case you were wondering) I have slimmed down a lot of code and made the site more efficient and semantic. first of all I have done away with all of the old javascript image rollovers and now handle all of those with css, this makes my load times a bit quicker and does away with any pauses or jitters while the browser tries to load the second image, and it also gets rid of all of my “onload” commands in the body. All of the rollover effects in the gallery pages are now handled using  jQuery to simply fade the images instead of changing the image out to a more desaturated version of the same image, that change alone probably saved me an entire megabyte because those pages were having to load a ton of thumbnails. Other then that, I made everything more semantic by implementing lists for all of the navigational items and getting my headings in order. Also, I probably deleted about 20 extra divs that didn’t really need to exist by putting their IDs on their child elements. What I like most about wordpress is how much it has made me learn php and there are so many things that are smarter with dynamic pages, such as building one dynamic sidebar and having all of the pages reference that instead of  including 50 lines of code on every single page just so that you can change 1 list item to the “over” state. Anyways, that is more than enough nerding out for now, comment if you have any further questions or just want to say hi.

-peace unto thee