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Crazy 4 Cult 4 Preview

Gallery 1998‘s 4th installation of Crazy 4 Cult will open in a little more than a week, and the lineup is insane. As the opening nears, some of the artists are letting us get a sneak peek of their pieces.

Scott Belcastro (A Clockwork Orange)

Rick Pellegrino (Willy Wonka)

Audrey Pongracz (The Shining)

Audrey Pongracz (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)

Can’t wait to see more stuff for this show pop up as the week goes on.

UPDATE: We’ll continue to keep this post going as more work surfaces. More behind the cut.

Read more…

Starred #30

This picture captures my FAVORITE part of screenprinting. RageHaus mixing colors.

Silhouette by Joe Bagley (via Oh So Beautiful Paper)

Poster by 1982 (Nate Duval + Jon Smith collabo)

Picture #62 of Make Something‘s 365 Project

Juliana Swaney print (via Art Hound)

Named after the Add Star feature in Google Reader, “Starred” is a column about things that catch my eye as I peruse the blogs I subscribe to. If you’d like to subscribe to Perfect Laughter, here’s a link to our RSS Feed.

Experiments and a New Jon Smith Print

If you haven’t noticed, Dennis has been holding down the fort around here. That’s because I’m working on a complete redesign of the blog. Have you missed me?? I really missed posting! I asked Dennis if I could have a turn today so I could update you.

I had planned to spend my whole break on the site, but something unexpected happened. Our “First Snow” print sold out at City Bird and they asked us for more!! After Dennis picked me up, spun me around and took me to Howell’s for a pitcher of beer, we got right to work on finishing up the next one. We wanted to print this one on old sheet music that we hand stained with tea and an ink wash. Each song had a name on top (“Confidence”, “Lost Happiness”, etc.) and we were in love with the idea of using it. Here’s what the inside cover looked like:

As it turns out, wavy, water damaged paper doesn’t screen print well. At least, not large blocks of color. The valleys in each wave were not picking up the ink in the screen. So after we had hand stained each piece of paper and I’d spent hours meticulously trimming 1/4″ off of each side, we had to admit that it was a failed experiment. Water and screen printing are not friends. Or so we thought.

Last night after taking out my frustration by killing my husband over and over in Mortal Kombat (sounds worse in print), I found this:

“Blotter Color” is a 4-color print by Jon Smith. Before printing the last color, the black line work, he splattered watercolors on each one. Each print is listed individually in his Big Cartel shop. He talks more about his experiment on his blog, including a video that shows the differences between each print.

Why did his experiment work but not ours? A few reasons, maybe. He used thick watercolor paper while our sheet music was really thin. And, he only printed line work on the watercolored paper where we were printing large blocks of color. Plus, we really waterlogged our paper all the way to the edges, and it looks like his edges aren’t wavy at all. Or maybe he knows some crazy witchery.

Posters by Jon Smith

Today I realized that I had something literally right in front of my face that I keep forgetting to talk about. I have this poster by Jon Smith hanging in my cube:

(Take note of lovely, depressing cube lighting.) Dennis and I each got one of these when were at Austin City Limits in 2006. We went to see the Long Winters play at the Mohawk’s opening weekend. They painted a huge Mohawk sign during the show. I have time lapse pictures of it, somewhere…

As you can imagine, Google wasn’t too helpful with a name like Jon Smith, and I couldn’t find anything else of his for quite a while. But recently, Jon starting blogging and making posters again. Here are a few of my favorites:

The Black Keys poster is by 1982, which is a joint effort between Jon and Nate Duval. All of the above are for sale in Jon’s Etsy Shop. The 1982 Big Cartel shop also has some neat things, including a few rare test prints.

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