Hey! Cleaning up the Nakatomi Studio here, and I noticed, we sure do have a TON of original artwork just sitting around in a pile in the corner…

So, instead of us pulling a Steve Ditko and using ‘em for blotter paper (seriously, he used the original artwork for his Spider-Man run as scrap paper…crazy balls) we’re giving the public their chance to lay hands on this stuff!

At the very least, the gallery we set up on our Flickr page is a neat little look behind the process of poster making.  Just about every poster that Tim Doyle has drawn by hand has the art now up for sale!  From Lost to Robocop- these are one of a kind hand-drawn artworks!

The sales will be handled through email- go to the Flickr gallery HERE and shoot us an email if interested!  First come, first served.

-alex fugazi

This is the second and final installment of the process thread for the printing of “The Sea Also Rises: Interlude- The Camino Cats Make Their Escape”

Read the first part HERE.

4th screen- Red now down- reg is looking hot. The Texas weather can be a real bitch when screen printing, as the humidity can cause the paper to swell up, throwing reg off. But it looks like the Texas weather gods smiled on us so far…

Them dots have lined up. To a printer, that’s about as beautiful as the actual poster. (Almost)

Throwing down the Transparent Black layer. Trans black is something Clint turned me on to a while back, and it’s hard not to use it in every print I do now. It adds a shadow layer to every color, doubling the total amount of colors in the print. The brown you see in the top left (the seat back) is made by the red over the green, FYI. Making a brown like that was something we learned totally by accident on the ‘If You’ve Seen What I’ve Seen’ print a while back- I like it a lot more than pre-mixed browns.

Clint between passes on the Transparent Black layer.

Waiting for the final layer, Black line. You’ll see we did the shark and tires w/ the Transparent Black as well. For me, part of the design fun is all about getting as much colors as possible out of the smallest number of screens!

This is the finished print! 18×24 edition of 160. We seriously didn’t have a single ‘reject’ in the run. Pretty neat! Signed and numbered by me.

This is the finished Line Art edition of the Camino Cats print- edition of 15.  It’s a whole different screen from the black layer on the color edition- there was a lot of changes from the original line art to the color version.

Each of the Line Art Variants (Edition of 15), like all the line art variants in this series, have hand-drawn doodles by me. The design on this one left a lot of open space down in the bottom for me to draw in, so these are way more complex than the drawings on the last two “Sea Also Rises” line-art prints.

These go up for sale tomorrow (Thursday) on the Nakatomi Site!

Please note- 25 of these puppies are going over to Japan for the ‘No Fin No Future’ art show/ fundraiser to help end Shark Fishing!  I already had this print in the pipeline when the call for entries came, so it dovetailed perfectly with their theme!  Now, if only we could train cats to rescue sharks in the real world, eh? Check out the art show HERE.

-Tim Doyle

Hey! I forgot how completely awesome process threads are. Luckily, Jay Ryan and Aaron Horkey stepped up and did an amazing one, and made me realize- oh yeah, I’m stupid for not doing this more.

Those cats are really, really bad. I had the general idea for this a few months back and once I sat down to start drawing it, it went in a slightly different direction than I started. I really didn’t plan on putting a shark back there, but I was leaving that space blank for SOMETHING, and then I thought what would cats want more than an aquarium full of fish. And THEN I thought a GIANT fish in the tank would be funnier. AND THEN I thought a shark is the most awesome fish in the world. And, once you think of a shark in a tiny tank, you can’t help but think of Damien Hirst.

So, not that I had a story in mind when I started this, other than cats stealing an El Camino, I’m now pretty sure they’re saving their shark buddy from a terrible fate at the hands of Damien Hirst. And for some reason, the cat in the passenger seat (Ringo Muffins) is very, very unhappy.

Above is a photo of the original drawing.  I tacked it to my wall and there it sat for months, accusing me of ignoring it. (Hey, I had a baby, and draw a monthly comic book, and run a business…so sue me!- wait. Don’t do that.)

This is Pickles. Pickles is a terrible cat. Pickles is the cat driving the El Camino in the print. Here Pickles is, sitting on my scanner, keeping me from working.  Pickles has been in all the ‘Sea Also Rises’ prints so far, and I’ve snuck her into a comic short story I did for APE press, as well as 2 album covers now. She’s just awful.

This is the scanned in and cleaned up line art from the original.  I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to handle the inserts in relation to the El Camino so I added the target lines in Photoshop after the fact.

Now- to the Nakatomi Print Labs!

Hey! We finally had an electrician by to wire up the shop properly. The entire print shop had been powered off of one plug. And now there’s a ton of plugs up in here. As dangerous as this looks, its WAY better than before. Trust me.

This is our fancy counterbalance system.  Pulley up top, weight at the bottom.  Keeps the screens up when we want it up, but it’s not strong enough to pull up when we want it down. Kevin Tong used science on us a while back and showed us a 2nd rope would keep the weight from going too low and pulling the screen too high.

Our home-built, back-lit washout. We cribbed the design from Satch Grimley. Except he’s got a drain on his. We have a siphon. Which raises the question- do I get an auto press or plumbing done first?

The powerwasher for our washout. Do not buy this one. I’ve gone through something like 4 of these in a year. But, I kept the original receipt from the first one, and the boxes from each one I go through, and Home Depot keeps exchanging them. Problem is, the next step up at Home Depot is a gas-powered monster.

This is the film for the Green Layer, taped to a sheet of 20×26 paper, that we use to get our registration squared away. We’ll key each subsequent color to that film. The parent sheets are 20×26, and the final trimmed print will be 18×24.

This might be a little hard to see, but there is 2 colors laid down here- the green and then the silver. The reason it’s hard to see is that Clint Wilson gets that registration dead on. He’s a wizard.

Here’s the prints on the top rack w/ 2 colors down, the green and the silver. We have 2 drying racks w/ 50 shelves each- got ‘em pretty cheap used. But- we really could use a 3rd. But first, we might need a bigger garage.

Ink shelf!  This is supposed to be in ROYGBIV w/ the mixed colors at the bottom and the unopened colors up top.  But that’s only going to last about 5 minutes once you start actually working.  SOMEONE bought up all the transparent base in town (seriously) so we’ve started ordering online.  Who knew how cheap you could get stuff on line?  See ya later, local art supply store…

This is Clint mixing the ink up. We use a Pantone book to match colors to the art, but that doesn’t eliminate the fact that it’s still hand and eye matched and mixed!

Clint locking down the screen for the 3rd Color, Blue.We added little rubber strips to the screens where it clamps down to prevent slippage

We get our films output on Vellum instead of acetate. We’ve had no problems with it, and it’s WAY cheaper than acetate. Here’s the screen for the Blue Layer. We’re using a vacuum press that Clint Wilson bought from AndyMac a few years back. If you look on the right, you can see where the shop vac plugs in. Just about every print that comes out of Nakatomi comes off of this thing. Which is freaking crazy, as we should have gotten a semi-auto press a while ago. But we had to have the electricity taken care of first. Eh?

Look at Clint- that’s a man doing mans work- making pretty pictures of kitties. But seriously, it’s a bitch to hand-pull all of these. That auto-press is looking better and better now…

3rd color down! And are you seeing that reg? EH? Dead freaking on.

3 colors out of 6 done so far.  We’ll be back tomorrow with pics of the next 2 hopefully.  There’s big big pics of all of this in our Flickr Feed HERE if you want a closer look at any of this!  We’ll let everyone know when this piece drops on our Twitter and Facebook.

Thanks!

-Tim Doyle

Man, has it been over 4 months since our last one already? Time flies when you’re traveling through time in a Delorean.

We here at Nakatomi Print Labs print a LOT of stuff.  And printing leads to mis-prints.  Some misprints are just too ‘almost perfect’ to throw out. OTHERS are used as test sheets and printed over top of a whole bunch making unique one-of a kind prints.

Those are the scratch/dents! ALMOST perfect, but not close enough to sell.  Some of them are signed, but instead of numbered, there’s an “X” in the corner. The 5 or so copies of  ‘If You’ve Seen What I’ve Seen’ are glow in the darks prints that we put in WAY too much glow ink.  Made the other ink all pebbly, but still pretty neat.  Trust me, there’s a lot more you’re not seeing.

Test sheets! That’s some of Clint Wilson’s Fish over Doyle’s White Dragon line art!

That’s Donaldson’s Fixd 9 over Clint’s Fish, over Borshard’s BTTF 3-D print that hasn’t even been released yet!  WHAAA?

Yes, Test sheets!  We’ve got like 25 of these, and one is going in each of the 1st 25 mystery tube orders.  (more if we can scrounge ‘em up.  We are printing every day!)

And of course, we’ll be putting in TOTALLY NORMAL prints that are on the site as well.

So here’s what you get-

Each tube will get you a random T-shirt in you size plus 4 prints- OR- No shirt and 5 prints.

As with all our Tube Sales, f you have ordered from us before, we’ll make every effort to make sure all NEW posters and shirts come your way!  If you order more than one tube, we’ll do the same!

We probably have enough stuff for 50 tubes total, and as I’m writing this blog entry, we’ve sold about 7…how the heck did that happen?  Weird.  So don’t sleep on it!

AVAILABLE RIGHT NOW- HERE.

-alex fugazi

There was a time not too terribly long ago when Marvel Comics would have done anything for money. This includes publishing special freebie issues peddling any good or service that coughed up the dough. Spidey sold AIM toothpaste (no, not Advance Idea Mechanics brand – nerd), the X-Men dropped in on the Texas State Fair, and the Hulk waxed on about the comfort of Soft-E Intrusion suppositories.

But it was a rare event when the House of Ideas created an all-new superhero as a paid advertisement. Such was the case when the Orkin man came calling.

Naturally, another – more established – Marvel superhero didn’t care for the new guy.

To add further insult to our sensibilities, the Orkin Company thought kids would be gullible enough to buy crappy merchandise featuring their new favorite superhero.

“Hey mullet, you might want to get your kid brother away from my robo-crotch. It turbo-pumps DDT faster and harder than even your mom can handle. Now that I think of it, is she home? I got some exsperminatin’ to do.”

The flipside of this comic featured a story starring Spider-Man. Come on, someone had to realize that was just wrong.

Dang, has it been 8 months already?

The final entry in the 8 month long Nakatomi Invitational Season 2 is here!

Nick Derington’s excellent print ‘Stranger’ is a moody little bit of sci-fi as still life.

And, like all invitational releases, this print comes along with a paired t-shirt-

And it glows in the dark, too!

The print is 18×24 hand printed, and signed and numbered by the artist.  Like the previous 7 entries, this shirt/poster combo is limited to 100 copies of each on Nakatomi, or ONE  MONTH on the site, whichever comes first!  Nick’s set will run from April 12th to May 12th.

Available as a set for $40, the print for $30, and the shirt for $20 right now in the INVITATIONAL section of the Nakatomi Store!

-alex fugazi