Holiday Card Time lapse!

While printing this years batch of holiday cards I thought it would be fun to show you some of the process that goes into silk screening by making a fun time lapse of the penguin cards being made! I take you from exposing and hosing to getting the job off press in under 2mins! Don't forget, the cards are now available in my shop!

Holiday Card Pre-Sale Ends Today!

Just a reminder, my Holiday Card Pre-Sale ends today! Order now from my Etys.com shop and save up to 50% on the Penguin Happy Holidays card, or the Monster Merry Christmas card!

The Pull - Ladies in Hats

This past weekend The Pull was lucky to have Angela Sun come and use our studio to help create her Lady In Hat prints on muslin and a striped cotton fabric. When you use our D.I.Y Custom Screen Printing options to pull your own prints, you'll find your screen exposed and on press waiting for you to print when you arrive.
We mix the inks, and give you a demo on how to proceed. Then we are there with you through the printing process to make sure you get the best prints possible.

Here I am running the flash curer to properly set the inks while Angela continues to run prints on the press. The end result, these lovely 6" x 6" Ladies in Hats wall art pieces.

Angela will be offering these in her Etsy shop soon. I'll update this post with a link as soon as I have one. If there's something you'd like to print, please check out the D.I.Y Custom Screen Printing section of my website and Together, Let's Make Something!

Update!!! - As members of my email list should be aware, Angela has opened her Etsy shop and is not offering these lovely items for sale!

Something Cute this way comes...

Just a sneak peak of something in the works that I'm really excited about... more soon!

Holiday Card Pre-Sale starts today!

The holiday season is almost upon us. Soon we'll be wrapping gifts, sending cards, traveling to visit loved ones, and just enjoying the winter months the only way we know how, with warmth, love and togetherness. To help with your holiday gift list, I'm busy making new gift items and cards. With that in mind, I am very excited to offer my new Holiday Greeting cards available for pre-sale!

These two cards will be hand screen printed using water based inks on Mohawk 30% PCW recycled Via Vellum Kraft paper. The cards will feature an original illustrations of either a gaggle of adorable penguins lining up to wish you and yours Happy Holidays! or two adorably furry monster about to exchange gifts while wishing everyone a Merry Christmas! Each style is available in a 5, 10 or 25 card pack.

Order your cards now via my Etsy.com shop and save up to 50%! The pre-sale starts today and runs till Nov 20th, after that their prices will increase. Cards will begin shipping on November 22nd via USPS first class mail. Stay tune to http://www.diskgrunt.etsy.com for more announcements and new gift items over the next couple of weeks! Thanks for all your support!

Penguins and Zombies

I'm working on something that involves a lot of little cute pengies ... So I've been sketching a lot of them!

And while a little late, I give you Zombie Penguin... "Herrings..."

Pup and Sheep review!

My Pup and Sheep t-shirts have received a lovely write up from Bo over at Loving This Tee. Loving this Tee is an awesome t-shirt review blog, and if you're looking for what new threads to buy I'd suggest checking it out.

Roscoe's Hopped Barley Tea

I was approached by Cristina Dunseth to help make her 1 year wedding anniversary gift something special. Her husband brews his own beer, and she was getting some letter pressed 24oz beer labels made but also wanted to get some posters and T-Shirts done up. The artwork was printed without knockouts, so we achieved a three color effect by printing on top of the white in some spots and directly on the paper or t-shirt in other spots. I also found out that the poster was submitted to the HOW Poster Design Contest! So you might here more about this print in the future.

Update! While mostly focused on the lables, the poster is shown over at Lovely Packages!

Update two! The poster, labels and shirt were featured on FPO recently! The identity also won a 2010 Portland Ad Federation Rosey award! Congrats to the hard work and excellent design skills of HUB Creative!

Marker Doodles

Just some fun marker doodles, I've been playing with my Copic markers lately trying to learn them as a coloring medium. I haven't figured out the blending marker yet but hope to get a better handle on them soon.

Inside the Rainbow

Inside the rainbow where bear has never been before. Never before now.

This is my first submission to Threadless for their Tron Legacy challenge. There's some great designs, and mines really a parody playing of the 80's time frame, mixing Care Bears with Tron. It may take a couple days to get approved but please check it out, and, if you like it vote it up via the link below!

Watson Invitation Suite

This lovely Wedding Suite was printed here at The Pull by Laura Trimmell, of CuriousDoodles, and myself for the Watson wedding.

Laura designed them and I helped print them. We used a combination of printing techniques, including inkjet for the small detailed txt on the back of the RSVP's, to Silk screening for the front of the RSVP's and the actual invites and even stamping for the envelopes. They are featured on the Oh So Beautiful Paper blog right now if you want to see more, and of course you can see more of them at Laura's Blog.

And as always if you have something fun you'd like to print, be sure to check out my DIY ScreenPrinting section.

Tummy Terrors

I've been working on a new t-shirt design that I'm thinking of submitting to a t-contest site. Figured I'd see if any one had any comments/suggestions before I move ahead. The concept is pretty simple, even monsters can have nightmares... It's a 3 color design, intended to be printed on an AA Slate colored t-shirt. Do you like the colors? Would you wear it? Thanks!

Big Foot Activity Book

A while back I made a post of some big foot drawings, that eventually became the Big Foot Activity Book! These Activity books were commissioned for Matt and Jessica Watsons wedding reception and are part of a larger body of custom prints and artwork. Each book features an illustrated day in the life of Big Foot as he try's to be on time for their big day. The tale is told over 8 colorable pages and features a custom word search. They were made available with crayons for the children in attendance at their reception.

The book's cover was printed out via lazer printer on letter sized Green Grocer's Brown Bag Paper, and the contents on plain letter sized, 28lb Hammermill txt paper. The book was then saddle stitched and folded for a final size of 8.5" x 5.5".

I really enjoyed making these custom books, if you have any illustration needs, be sure to email me!

New Me, and other updates!

So I haven't posted for a bit, mainly because diskgrunt.com has been getting an over haul. I've updated the site with a few design changes, added a bunch of work and created a new D.I.Y. Screen Printing section. I'm now offering hand silkscreened goodness to the masses, and for those of you who want a bit of ownership on your prints, you can now pull the actual prints. I've only listed out the most commonly asked for options but if you're interested in doing something different, or using more colors, just email me and let me know what you want!

I also wanted to introduce the new me, I've been struggling with how to draw myself lately and noticed that I was getting a wee bit to garfieldy/simpsony in my bio comics. So I've simplified the style a bit, made it match more of how I draw my other characters, and from now on you'll be seeing me drawn more like this.

Wedding Ties

So there's going to be a lot of work being posted from my good friend Matt Watson's wedding, but I thought I would start with these. These ties are the result of a collaboration between Laura, aka @Curiousdoodles, and Matt, with me setting up and pulling the prints. Each tie was intended as a gift for the groomsmen, the ushers and the fathers. The green tie, was the tie Matt wore as he was married.

We managed to print the ties with a 156mesh screen, with water based inks and with some tape registration, we were able to tile the pattern across the length of the tie. There was definitely some difficulties to overcome, and the ink didn't always lay evenly but overall we were pretty happy with the end results.

I'm really enjoying helping people print on items beyond t-shirts and loving doing work that holds so much meaning for the people receiving it. As always, let me know if you need any custom screen printing done.

Petri Baby Announcements!

Paul and Basia Petri came to me with a unique announcement idea to let their family know that they are expecting. The end result are the onesies above that Basia designed and I screen printed for them.

I was happy to help them spread their good news and in an effor to extend my own congradulations to the couple, I made them this wall plaque version of their design to hang. Congratulations you two!

It's our last First Thursday event of 2010!

Come out and see us tonight! Curiousdoodle will be showing off these rad wood panels she made and I'll be showing off some of my new wares!

Journals for Chase Jarvis and Crew

I'm really excited to post these images now that the gifts are in hand. About two weeks ago Laura got a visit from a college friend of hers, Michal Garcia, who happens to be an amazing photographer. He currently lives in Hong Kong but, he won a contest Chase Jarvis had held, and that brought him to Seattle to hang with Chase and his crew. He then came to visit Laura and did some wonderful portrait photography of us, our work spaces, and our crafts. As repayment we collaborated and made these custom Moleskin journals for Chase and his staff.

Each cover features an original illustration of Chase and crew heading for a photo shoot as flock of crows. We tried to embed a lot of jokes and details into the illustrations so I hope they came through. In addition to the covers, each journal was customized for it's recipient, Laura hand embroidered their name on the first page.

Michal was in SanFran and then Back to Seatle while we tried to get these printed up, so we ended up mailing them to him, I threw in a small surprise hand made Kraft paper journal for Michal. I hope you like it!

Arriba Ziba!

Arriba Ziba Hood to Coast team shirts fresh off the press! Featuring an original design by Heather Cummings these shirts were printed using water based ink on Slate colored American Apparel Sheer Jersey T-Shirts.

These shirts were a bit of a pain to print with the little heat wave we have passing through portland. My studio lacks AC, and with the high heat and low humidity my inks were drying faster then I could pull them. I ended up washing out the screen 3 times to finish this job up. So I think it's time I cough up the cash and get some climate control, it seems I'll need an AC for the temp and a humidifier to keep the air from being to dry...

If anyone is interested in custom silkscreening, give me a shout and we'll work something out!

Find Diskgrunt stuff locally!

Just a heads up, you can now purchase my Monster v. Robot Panels and Cards at Tender Loving Empire and my comics over at Reading Frenzy in downtown Portland. These are two of my favorite stores in Portland and I'm glad to be on their shelves surrounded by so much talent.

Stop in, tell'em Diskgrunt sent'cha and check out all the great local and independent goods! And, Of course, you can still buy direct from me at my Etsy shop!

Hot off the press - Pocket Notebooks return to diskgrunt.etsy.com !

Just in time for back to school, there's two new pocket notebooks in my shop featuring a cute lil monster trying to remind you to bring a pencil and a penguin thinking of his favorite meal. Joining them is a reprint of one of my most popular notebook designs from last year, Herding Your Thoughts, featuring a loving sheep dog herding a group of sheepies.

Get'em while their hot!

Portrait Challange

So when I was younger and teaching myself how to draw I used to do a self portrait as a litmus test. I'd do these portraits once or twice a year then compare them to the prior years drawing and see if I improved, stalled or degraded in skill level. I think the last one of these I did shortly after my first year at college. Foundation Year was full of more technical drawing but as I shifted into my major my drawings focused more on cartooning and I let my more traditional skill set rust a bit.

So this self portrait, admittedly not my best work, is my new starting point. Instead of a year, I want to start doing a weekly portrait ( not of me) and a bi-monthly one of myself. On top of that, I want to get back to life drawing. I started going just prior to leaving ZIBA but haven't kept it up since.

Anyone want to join in on the challenge?

Fresh off the press - Custom order

Thought I'd share these bachelor party t shirts I printed up late last week. A shirt was made for each member of the party, with the Bachelor getting the red one. The design was supplied to me and the shirts were printed by hand with water based inks on American Apparel sheer jersey shirts. If you're interested in custom prints, either printing your design or having custom artwork made, let me know.