Here’s an 8-minute long reduction of the hour long process required to make each copy of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK. I wish I had documented the illustration, stencil making and stamp making processes. Too late now. I’m not going back and faking it for the sake of documentation.
I’ll do one of these for FORE in the next few weeks.
I submitted a bunch of artwork for DQM’s Fall/Winter 08 line. Most was so outlandish that I couldn’t quite imagine it being printed on anything–Nazis, foot fetish imagery, crack addicted bald eagles… They went with the eagle. For the shirts, I had to tone his addiction down to nicotine from crack. I still think the crack pipe would have made for perfect irony on the chests of the drug addled children of Republican donors in Greenwich and Chappaqua, but crack–it’s the real thing.
Here’s my original pencil drawing along with the final vector artwork that I submitted to DQM.
I reckon they’ll update their website with the new stuff in a few days. They’ve got some gorgeous new vans and some beautiful waxed cotton jackets in for the season as well. There are some special Nikes too, but fuck Nike. I bought a pair of Colette’s weird-ass French dictionary Adidas while I was there today.
I was just going to post the blocks I etched for the packaging and titling, but since last weekend, the project’s evolved quickly. BUT THEY DON’T BLINK is a story about walls–hand-stenciled onto wallpaper. The story is a social snapshot reduced to a set of three five-line stanzas and spread out over fifteen 18″x24″ pages. Like FORE, it’s a poem and a children’s book. I’m considering delivering the story serially as a set of three five-page books–more or less making the volumes available as I finish illustrating each stanza and doing my best to make the overall project affordable to collect.
I’ve been disappointed lately in the cost of things like t-shirts and art prints. I always thought that the point of a print was to give people something exclusive at an accessible price. I’m not sure how deeply illustrators and designers are shoving their wrists up their asses to produce their prices, but arbitrary pricing, hyphy meatheads, corrupt gallerists, ebay and agenda-driven journalists have all had a hand in contaminating access via unrealistic artificial inflation. There’s no excuse for a hand-printed poster to cost more than 25 dollars. Frankly… traditional ink screened/stenciled/stamped posters on paper shouldn’t crest 10 dollars.
So, here’s the skinny. I have enough material to make 400 15-print books and 300 un-stenciled five-sheet poster sets. This isn’t set in stone yet, but I think I can split the book edition up into 200 fifteen-print books at $120 a pop and 200 three-volume print zines at $50 per volume. The 300 poster sets would be $25 per set. Books and zines–signed and numbered. Posters–numbered. I’ve never understood how people feel justified signing things they haven’t printed themselves.
If you want to reserve a copy of anything, email me: protest {at} visitordesign {dot} com
No commitment. I’ll just let you know as soon as whatever you’re interested in is ready.
page1&2:
page3&4:
page5:
BUT THEY DON’T BLINK VOL.1 OF 3
pinkslip in her purse, pink panties on feet, mom sells her ass to buy babies meat
when belts tighten up and it’s hard to pay bills we sell off our children to farms in the hills
to keep ethics low and prices less high, x mart takes cashiers to the dumpsters to die
gas guzzles dollars and trucks guzzle gas, so the makers of trucks are all out on their ass
they’re drinking away the economy spook as they pass out in puddles of piss and of puke
illustrations, text and wallpaper ©2008 chris habib / visitor
Nate traded me this lathe a few years ago for some Wolf Eyes footage I shot for them. Whenever they tour, it’s guaranteed that Wolf Eyes is hawking epic, editioned, handmade tour merch. They do it so frequently, that they lose track of the editions as they become superseded by newer output. I brought up the Mangled Mess lathe this weekend before the band played the final McCarren Park Pool show. Nate instantly recalled the edition from a description of the artwork, but was foggy on some specifics. He had cut each record into cardboard-backed and decoupaged plastic ice-cream lids on his Presto lathe. The cardboard jackets were open on two sides–the result, apparently of just having cut up and spraypainted over old 12″ jackets. Each record was enclosed in a different hand-collaged cover and etched onto an ice-cream lid with a uniquely collaged back. Mine has some pencil-written text–spraypainted over and then topped with fishnetted and booted legs.
