Mikey Burton

1willwork82_wilcomilwaukee98_6a01053648e879970c0120a5c704df970b-800wi102_outsidersposter1_v2120_wilcopittsburghcolumbuslecture

One of the greatest things about the Avant Garage is constantly looking a little deeper and finding amazing little gems like Mikey Burton’s work. Not only is Mikey’s work phenomenal and inspiring, but his process, which he so graciously shared with us, can’t help but motivate you to take your work occasionally outside of the computer. See more of Mikey’s work ///here///

Tell us a little about yourself and what steps you took to get here.
While in grad school two of my friends and I were very interested in the resurgence of handmade gig-poster art. We were fascinated by this, and were eager to try our hand at it. Also, there was a lack of poster art happening in Northeast Ohio, so we took it upon ourselves to fill this void. We taught ourselves how to (poorly) screenprint and gave ourselves the moniker, Little Jacket (taken from an LCD Soundsystem song “…little jackets and borrowed nostalgia from the unremembered eighties”).

We had done about 3 posters for local venues around Cleveland. After that, one of the same venues asked us to do a poster for the upcoming Modest Mouse show. From there we started getting emails from people about doing ‘real work’.

I continued to work with Little Jacket for about 4 years in Cleveland, but at the end of 2008 I moved to Philadelphia. By day I work at 160over90, and by night I work on my own freelance projects. Sleep is for the weak.

What’s your go-to source of inspiration outside of art or music?
I’m not sure there is anything else? Maybe food? Nature… I like putting animals in my work.

What are some of your influences as to your style?
Oh man, where do I start… Lester Beall, Push Pin (Milton Glaser & Seymour Chwast), Hatch Show Print, Sister Corita Kent, Sagmeister, Mo Lebowitz, Modern Dog Design Co, Lance Wyman, Saul Bass, Pentgram, Alvin Lustig, Roger Dean, Hipgnosis, Charley Harper, Gerd Arntz,

More Current: Aesthetic Apparatus, hammerpress, Yee-Haw Industries, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., Studio On Fire, Dirk Fowler, Alan Kitching, Paul Sahre, Felix Sockwell, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Office(SF), Draplin Design Co., CSA Design.

Two of my favorite design resources:
Handbook of pictorial symbols: 3,250 examples from international sources
By Rudolf Modley, William R. Myers

American Wood Type: 1828-1900
By Rob Roy Kelly (good luck finding a reasonably priced copy)

Words to live by?
WILL WORK FOR WORK


What blogs or magazines do you turn to for creative inspiration?
Magazines: Print, CA, HOW… the usual Blogs: Coudal Partners, Creative Review, It’s Nice That, Grain Edit, Form Fifty Five, Draplin, Abduzeedo, Northcoast Zeitgeist

What’s your personal favorite piece of yours? Tell us a story behind it.
I did a poster for a Jonathan Richman Show in Cleveland once. It wasn’t the best poster ever, but I put a lot of time and effort into it; it was a large letterpress poster, each print was inked by hand.

I got the chance to talk to him after the show and I gave him a few prints. I was explaining the process of letterpress to him… how it was all composed of actual wood type and then each hand cranked through antique printing equipment. After I was done then there was an awkward moment of silence… He then burst into a ramble about how he was training with an old man to become a stone mason in Italy, and then started talking about the Pantheon… He made no sense, but it blew my mind. In retrospect, he might have been messing with me, but at the time I thought it was awesome.


What’s your all-time favorite piece of art or design? (*not created by you)
Maybe not all time, but really got me into poster art.
http://www.gigposters.com/poster/3944_Spoon.html

What’s your current creative obsession?
Now and always… Bears.

Tell us your process of creating your very distinct screen-printed-aged-texture.
It’s really simple, I print it out and scan it back in. It’s dumb, but that’s what I really do. I’ve told a lot of people this and they don’t believe me. I’ve done a lot of letterpress and screen-printing in my life, and I’m always trying to figure out the best way to fake it. One process I really liked and used for a while was a photocopy transfer pen, but the chemicals in them are HORRIBLE for you. But the results are awesome! I used this process a lot on my thesis project.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeyburton/sets/72157615510130737/

Here’s a good example:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeyburton/3366662641/

I got really sick from using these pens in a unventilated area (my nose was bleeding and stuff) So, I went in search of another method…. Some people speak of this stuff called Wintergreen oil that supposed to transfer photo copies just as well but I’ve never found it. I was lucky I guess, by chance I installed the toner cartridge incorrectly, so now whenever I print something out, I get great chalky mottled textures. So, I create vector shapes and print them out through my crappy printer, and then scan those in.

My advice is to just try stuff outside of the computer. If it looks like it was made outside of photoshop, it probably was.

Sometimes I let the process just happen through printing too. Like all the mottled textures in this postcard I made for the cranky pressman. The gray part was just a flat vector shape, and all that fun texture happen naturally through the process of letterpress printing (note: I did not print this)

http://mikeyburton.com/project/cranky-pressman/

Thanks so Much Mikey for your participation in the Garage
-the AG-

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 at 12:49 am. It is filed under Design, Illustration, Process and tagged with , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.