“Gojira Vs. The Smoke Monster” PROCESS!
This print is ON SALE NOW HERE!
While you’re here…we wanted to show off some of the behind-the-scenes process pictures for this great new print!
“Gojira Vs. The Smoke Monster” is an 18×24 4 color hand-printed silkscreen poster- signed and numbered by the artist in a first edition of only 150 worldwide.
Like almost all of Doyle’s prints, it starts with a hand-drawn line-art image, done in pencil, brush and ink, and felt-tip pen. This print was drawn on a sheet of 12×16 Strathmore brand Bristol board- it’s a really great surface to work on, and it can stand up to a lot of abuse from wet media, as you’re about to see. Once the line-art is completed, it is scanned in at 600 dpi, and then…
Doyle hand-tones the original art board with watercolor and gouache paint, applied with a Windsor Newton Series 7 Sable brush, size 4. Blocking in the grey tones and values this way gives the final product a more organic appearance than you would normally get from the flat-color aesthetic of screenprinting. That hand-painted image is now scanned in and lined up with the original line-art, and then bitmapped into tiny little dots, which then makes it suitable for screenprinting. Then, Doyle digitally lays in the colors in Photoshop and sends the layers off for burning onto screens!
Here you see the first 3 layers of the print down on the actual paper. The ink is still wet! First color down was the warm grey, then the red, and then transparent black ink! As you can see in the face and hands, the watercolor detailing on the skin is pushed back to the transparent black layer to soften it up a bit, and make it look a little bit softer. The rest of the detail is on the black ink layer, as you can see below!
Here’s the finished print, before it gets trimmed down to 18×24. (We print on 20×26 sheets to give us a handling edge and room for registration marks.) You can see at the top of the sheet the color notes and print instructions to the printers!
ON SALE NOW! Pick one up today HERE.
-Thanks for reading!
