Rock, Paper, Zombies! – a Halloween-themed, 62 poster retrospective of our friend Rich Bernett’s gig poster work over the past year will haunt the Strathmore Mansion this coming Friday night (10/28) as will performances from some of the bands for whom Rich has designed posters. I’d go on a bit about what to anticipate, but Rich himself has this covered:
As the video attests, Rich is also bringing with him a number of regional poster designers to display their work on Friday and it’s these artists who Rich will be chatting up here at TVD over the coming days in anticipation of Friday night’s RPZ! event.
Wednesday Rich chatted with John Foster of Bad People Good Things, yesterday Anthony Dihle of Fire Studio shared his thoughts, and today Brianna Bevan and Jay Frank from Itty Bitty Press are in the hot seat before tonight’s event.
Please state your name for the record, as well as any name you wish you had instead.
Brianna Bevan and Jay Frank. I’m not sure we covet any names—if we did I think we could just change them—but I guess it wouldn’t be so bad to be “Melinda and Bill Gates.”
Where do you currently work? What is your role there?
We are both full time at Itty Bitty Press, where we print and design tshirts, posters and art prints. We both have our hands in every aspect of our business, although Bri does about 75% of the art and Jay does about 90% of the printing.
How do you guys get most of your jobs? Word of mouth? Art shows? Do you advertise services?
A majority of our work comes by word of mouth, both from our friends and clients spreading the word. People have been great to us over the past two years since we started Itty Bitty. We do also get a fair amount of work from people we meet at arts and craft shows. A lot of times these are some of our favorite clients to work with, because they’re essentially looking at most of our portfolio right there and they know exactly what they’re getting into with us.
We don’t currently buy advertising on the radio or in any publications, but we do some unconventional types of advertising. For example, the fact that the posters we make are actually hung in public with our name on them is great advertisement. We get a good amount of work that way. Another example: we recently did a t-shirt design for a local non-profit radio station, and as part of the deal, we’re underwriting some of their shows. It’s not exactly advertising, but it does expose our name and brand to their audience. If you listen to NPR, it’s like when the host says “portions of today’s programming are made possible by so-and-so.” We’re going to be one of their so-and-sos for a bit.
Which part of your process, from designing, to printing, to sharing the final product do you enjoy most?
I think the most fun shared moment we have is when we pull the first print of what we think will be the final screen of a print, we look at it together and go “oooh.”
Ah, yes—as the ink starts to dry in the screen! As printers, do you ever feel limited by the amount of colors you will be using per poster? Do you find that budget dictates your color choices, or do you allow yourselves to just go with whatever the piece needs to look good?
Budget is a factor, but our opinion of our work is what has the final say. When we’re concepting, part of the process is making decisions about how many colors we can do and stay within budget. Because we don’t use the computer when we’re designing posters, when we start printing them, they’re still just a vision. We have a pretty good idea what the end product will look like, but we’re never 100% sure. So, sometimes in the middle of the process, we’ll make the decision to add a color we hadn’t originally planned on.
On some occasions, the plan actually is “keep printing until it looks how we want it.” This doesn’t happen often, but our poster for Bill Harris’s show earlier this year is a good example of that. Bill is an oil painter that wanted us to reinterpret his painting in our style. His original was very colorful, full of lifelike tattoos and lots of shading. Before we even started drawing that one, I think we counted it would be something like at least 13 colors, and a TON of transparent overprinting. Along the way, we decided we wanted to soften a few things, clarify a few others, and in the end, it turned out to be a 17-color print that took us two weeks to finish.
Besides screen printing, what field of art do you wish you had more time to learn?
Mutually, we’d like to expand beyond screenprinting into letterpress and woodblock printing. Individually, Bri would like to learn poodle shearing and Jay would like to learn the art of burlesque dance.
If a magic client said “To inspire your ideas on this next project, I will grant you one day to hang out in a room with any object of your choice…” what would you ask for?
How about we hang out with the magic client? So many of our ideas are spawned from random conversations we have with each other and with other interesting people. I’m sure a magic client would have a story or two we could riff on.
Seriously. Plus, if he were magic, I guess he could just make his own posters. Suppose he could give you one superpower. What would it be?
You know that scene in “Fantasia” where Mickey Mouse is the sorcerer’s apprentice? If I could wave a wand and–without all the chaos–watch all our screens clean themselves, that would be pretty amazing.
Are there any good stories behind any of the pieces you plan to bring to the “Rock Paper Zombies” show? Do tell!
There is a series of prints along with a print for the RVA Music Festival that were severely interrupted when Hurricane Irene blew through Richmond and knocked out our power for an entire week. Man, we spent a lot of time using the free wifi at the local Panera that week.
