The Diamond Center 7in Special Edition Album Cover

I recently completed one of the largest projects I have ever taken on. The two lead members of The Diamond Center, Brandi Price and Kyle Harris commissioned me to screenprint 100 album covers for the special edition white vinyl, for our new 7in release. (I also play in the band, hense, the "our")

I didn't want to plan this one out, because the act of screenprinting is so mechanical in itself, I just wanted to dive in. So I did, with a ballpoint pen.

I didn't expect to like it once finished, but I did. I started playing around with digital color for a bit and nothing was really clicking. So I started over, with a little more thought involved.

I decided to paint the piece, even thought it would make printing it much more difficult, I would be happier with the result in the end. I would print it in CMYK. It did in fact make it much, much more difficult.
Final piece: 20"x 14" ballpoint pen and watercolor.  the printed piece would be 10"by 7".

Little did I know that I was meerly less than a quarter of the way to the finish line. Bwahaha.
The printing process was much more exhausting than I thought. It took a few hours per color.
Magenta:

while creating the halftones in photoshop, I made the dot frequency WAY too high, around 60. maximum recommended is 35... The ink was drying in the screen every few minutes.  But thanks to my super awesome instructor Andrew Kozlowski, he showed me how to make it work.
The Yellow:

I made my own batch of CMYK inks and thinned them down till it was nearly as fluid as water so it could pass through the tiny holes in the emulsion. I learned a whole lot about screen printing ink and screen printing this semester from Andrew.
 The Blue:

 Each pull needed to be nearly consistent with the last. Too hard, and the whole image would get lost in whatever color I was pulling, too soft and spots wouldn't print. So I learned how to do consistent pulls real quick. I decided not to print black, instead just left it at Cyan Magenta and Yellow. Black looked much too harsh and sucked out alot of the warmth from the piece.

Then I screen printed the type. The lower type is set at 7pts.  what I also like about it is that it acts as a mini poster. the bottom quarter of the print folds back around the album as you will see below.

Then came the cutting, signing numbering and stuffing.

 all 100

Screen printing is known as a production art, producing multiples of a print. What I love about screen printing, or what gets me excited about how I print, no matter how naive it is, is how every print is a little bit diferent.  Below you can see a few diferent variations in color that came out, and I love that.

So, 10 bucks gets you a screenprinted cover/ poster  AND white vinyl. A deal.

 This is also the first recorded and pressed album I've been on. So it was double the excitement seeing the visual and musical art come together at once.

Brandi made dozens of buttons. awesome.

You can see a video from the vinyl release party and some recent videos, photos and interviews with the Diamond Center here on my tumblr, and also our website

Order the 7in here: SOMEDAYTHISWILLALLMAKESSENSE

A very special thanks to Andrew Kozlowski and Meljska Fawn