Thee Oh Sees - again!

Well The High Seas (our deceased shop/gallery) is still sort of around, only now we just help to bring bands to our far-flung shores. This is the second time we've helped to bring them over, and the second poster I've done for them, was on a bit of a 50s sci-fi buzz for this one, painting it really made me want to read more sci-fi. It's gouache but this time on beautiful, heavy, 550gsm, only-comes-in-large-expensive-sheets paper. Sooo dreamy!

I forgot to take a pic of it in progress, but here it is with some side scribbles.

Control your blues

Blues Control are coming! This poster went through a lot of transformations before I was happy with it, fun to do something not strictly hand drawn. The photo is one from my travels, mountains in eastern Iran.
Info about the tour here and hear their stuff here.

Heather Leigh poster.

A poster commission for the Audio Foundation, it was fun getting back into detailed pencil drawings. Heather Leigh is from the US but now lives in Scotland. More info on the tour here and here

Side by side

Well go and have a look in the latest edition of Volume, the NZ Herald's new weekly music magazine, page 18. It's my poster for Thee Oh Sees next to my friend Emily's poster for the Broken Heartbreakers & Bond Street Bridge tour. Her boyfriend Sam is Bond Street Bridge and she makes the art for his stuff as well as doing great prints and paintings and such, have a gander at her prolific blog here. Sam has a very funny blog too where you can read all about his many tours and listen to his lovely music, here. And the Broken Heartbreakers also have a blog worth reading, basically everyone has a blog which requires your attention.

It's exciting to see my poster actually printed out, on newsprint too, so tactile.

Thee Oh Sees poster

The High Seas is still in operation but now as a sort of promotions company/occasional record label, our latest venture is bringing over San Franciscan pop/folk/psychedelic outfit Thee Oh Sees. Oh boy!

I'm really big on alligators at the moment, they've totally superseded octopuses as my favourite aquatic animal to draw. I wanted the poster to look super summery so gave my gator a pool to lounge in. This one was done in my customary manner of scanning in pencil layers,  I love the textures it gives but it means it takes 20 or so scans and tons of layers.

Hildur Gudnadottir poster

Hildur Gudnadottir is a cellist from Iceland who Altmusic are bringing to NZ in August. I got asked to do the poster and am getting paid!! Boy I love the dollars.
Hildur's music is very beautiful and haunting, it sort of sounds like rusty bits of the hull of a shipwreck rubbing together from the motion of the tides so I thought it'd be appropriate to do an underwater themed poster. I'm really bummed out that I'm going to miss this show, here's some links to her stuff:
http://www.hildurness.com/
http://www.myspace.com/hildurness

The Right to Talk to Strangers

These are for Simon Comber's EP release tour of the U.S. 

I started doing it in my normal way, doing a drawing then adding colour with tracing paper and pencil scanned into photoshop, but then almost at the due date I decided to just paint it with gouache and ink instead. The tour dates didn't fit into the text box I left so I did three separate posters for the central west coast, the northwest and the east. For more info on Simon Comber and his tour check out his myspace and/or website

The colours were inspired by this picture from a 60's interior design book, its very inspiring.

Capsize poster inspiration

As promised, here's the poster and the two main poster inspirers:

Chuck Berry & the Drifters for $2.00!! Swoon.

Ghoul Friends poster

Come along! Its my first solo exhibition! 

I'll put some photos up of my messy studio soon, sneak peeks!

Capsize Party!!

Well I wasn't going to do a poster for this because of being busy with my exhibition but then we couldn't get anyone else to do one so here it is:

It's based on a few old posters from the late 50's, and once again I found the process of making a new poster look like an old one oddly staisfying, albeit pretty time consuming. You can't tell with this version but I even went to the trouble of putting halftone on all the photos, now that's dedication.

This gig is going to be super awesome and its for a good cause, so just come along whydon'tyanoexcusesnow, ok?

The almost last poster

We haven't done the announce for this gig yet...sshhhh!

I did the bones of this drawing years ago then fiddled around with it and added some colour, hey presto!

Grouper poster

Sun Araw poster

The finished poster for Sun Araw, lots of doubling up going on. Thats two posters done and three to go...

Another poster

Become slightly obsessed with the phenomenon of surfing dogs..

I wanted this poster to look like an old record sleeve, I think it came out pretty well. It was actually kind of fun making fake wrinkles and distressed marks. Come along if you be in Auckland.

100 Clams

Another poster for The High Seas, this one is for the Christmas show where everything is $100, should be a doosey!

Kevin Blechdom!!!

The High Seas (+ Cheese on Toast) is presenting Kevin Blechdom!!!! So I got to do the poster for it, it was a really fun one to do, put it all together on photoshop. Thank god there are so many ridiculous cat photos on the internet!
I'm super excited about the show, Kevin Blechdom is one of my favourites and last time she played it was stunning, the guts! the nudity!
 There's a good sample album of hers from a radio interview on PBSfm which is available on the free music archive here.

Ducktails Poster

Pink Reason

Pink Reason came and played at our gallery. They were AWESOME. I did the poster.

Posters

I've been pretty busy this last month with organizing stuff for The High Seas, a new gallery/venue/bookshop/record shop of which I am co-director. Here are some posters I did for the first two events happening there.