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I'm James Buchanan.
This is Melissa Buchanan.
We're married.
We're the Little Friends of Printmaking and we're illustrators and artists and
printmakers.
We've always made prints, we've always printed our own work.
It helps generate ideas for us, and we're really connected to the process.
>> Yeah, it's a really meditative process, which I find extremely appealing.
There are a series
of steps.
So if you don't feel like doing something one day, you can do a different step and
then do the thing that you didn't feel like maybe the next day.
>> There's a framework and it helps guide you.
I relate to colors so differently because I actually have to mix it.
It's not an exact science.
Well, don't tell a color theory person it's not an exact science, but like-
>> We like to have people consider
the print as an object.
And to do that, we try to play with the way that the inks interact with each
other. >> Transparency is a big thing for us.
We love, in silk screen, how you print one layer of color
over another layer of color and you get a texture shift.
The way that a silk screen is typically designed is you go from the lightest color
to the darkest color and you always end it with a key layer that unites everything.
This is a bucket of emulsion, I'm putting it into a scoop coater.
And this is how we get it onto the screen. We don't know for sure,
when we're printing it, that it's all gonna come together.
>> A thousand little things can go wrong.
>> Yeah. All at the same time, why not?
>> Yeah. >> This print is called Sugar Shack.
It's based on a poster design that we did in 2007.
It sold out almost immediately but people were always asking us about it.
And then suddenly we were, why don't we just plagiarize ourselves?
We'll just make another candy shop.
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We really do think of a print as being a 3-D object, and
not just screen printing as being a way of replicating a drawing.
So we'll have all these shapes.
>> That are almost like jigsaw pieces.
>> Doing things this way just completely rewired our brains where everything we do
has to just be a touch more thoughtful.
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>> We are always trying to push our aesthetic.
And to do that, we make work for ourselves.
So we'll make prints for ourselves to further our aesthetic so that we have
items that we can show art directors and say, well, we can make this too.
>> We make the things we wanna make.
And then they're just out there.
And people are, yeah, I saw that you were doing this.
Can you do that for this magazine cover or whatever?
And we'll do it.
A big thing that we do, I guess that we've always done, is sell our work in-person.
We do things like Renegade Craft Fair and Comic Con, and we'll go and sell our work
in-person, and then you're in a booth that's a ten by ten cube of your work.
And you're like there it is, that's what I've been doing and it's just a trip.
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>> When we were studying print making in college, a local promoter saw us at
a bunch of shows and the promoter asked us if we would be interested in making
some concert posters for the shows that he was trying get people to go to.
One day we were going up State Street of Madison and we saw that the local
promoter was putting up some of our posters for a band that was playing soon.
And then as we were coming back all the posters were gone.
And at first we were just like, wait, did he take them down?
What happened to them?
And what had happened was people stole them because they,
I guess, liked the poster.
It was fascinating to us, just the public's response to it.
>> So that blew our minds we were like, maybe, what's graphic design?
Can we do that as a job?
What's illustration?
This is the first reprinting with different colors.
CMYK is great for newspapers.
I just hate the individual ink colors,
so we'll do a skewed CMYK where it's turquoise and
then golden rod and then flourescent pink and then grey instead of black.
And that's what we did with this print.
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I encourage anyone, if you're a a student and you're studying graphic design or
illustration, to find out where you can take a silk screen course.
It's probably at the college or the school that you're studying at.
Just give it a try, cuz once you start working with printmaking it will
completely change the way you draw and
it will completely change the way you think about designing things.
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>> So what'd you think?
Tell us in the comments.
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Bye!
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