Visiting Artist Jay Ryan

Finally! My some pictures from last week when we had an amazing visiting artist at school. Jay Ryan of The Bird Machine came for a weekend and we printed a fine art poster for him. When we have a visiting artist come to the shop they usually come with a print idea prepared and all the graduate printmakers help that artist print their work. The Bird Machine is in Skokie, Illinois. Jay started this amazing screen shop in his basement and has sense moved into his own place. As you can see from his website he prints both fine art and promotional posters for musicians. Not a bad way to spend your days, right? It's pretty inspiring for all they diy-ers out there.
Here are some photos from our weekend starting with me looking crazy after drinking too much red bull.

This is the only picture I got of Jay as he's walking out of the room. Darren and Curt here did most of the actual printing. I wanted to print but I was a bit too short. Okay, I was also super nervous I'd mess something up, too, so I might have milked the height thing a little more than I should have.So instead I drank Red Bull and held the screen up and pulled the printed sheets to put on the drying rack. Not a bad job at all but lots of moving around. We printed 200 posters!

Here's Darren getting the print registered with the fancy shmancy masking tape on the table registering system.

Here is a pic of the prints after two or three color runs.

Now we add red.

I love this pic of everyone goofing around. 200 prints is a lot of prints to pull but we all stayed in good spirits. Jay was a lot of fun to work with and we listened to copious amounts of Girl Talk.

Jay Ryan is not only a printmaker, he's also in a band called Dianogah. While he was here his band played at The House Cafe. It was a fun break from printing and his band is really rad. Check them out here.
So, you're probably wondering after all that, what did the finished print look like?! Well, remember how my camera broke???

BLAH!

But if you go to The Bird Machine site you'll see the finished piece. It's here. It looks like it already sold out which is great! But if you like what you see on Jay's site you should buy it. The posters are beautiful and affordable and actually hand-pulled screenprints. That's a real deal!