Johnny Two Tone Club

Interview with Studio Lost & Found

Studio Lost & Found is a Perth-based creative agency that specialises in strategic brand development for the gourmet food and beverage industry.

For our next interview, Duncan sat down for a chat with founder, designer, and all-around nice chap, Daniel McKeating.

Where are you from?
Mount Hawthorn, Western Australia.

What’s your day job?
I manage Studio Lost & Found with my wife Rebecca.

Why screen printing?
Design + illustration + messy inks = awesome. It’s also an excuse to hang out with a fantastic group of talented, inspiring individuals.

Whose screen printing do you most covet?
Jason Munn – his work is incredible. Great ideas, beautifully designed, and screen printed to perfection.

Your top two PMS colours?
At the moment I’d have to say PMS 297U and PMS 804U.

Your top two songs to screen by?
1. Karma Police by Radiohead.
2. Scooby Snacks by The Fun Lovin’ Criminals.

Your top two blogs?
At the moment I’d say my favourites are FPO (For Print Only) and LovelyPackage.

Your top two typefaces?
At the moment I really dig Brandon Grotesque by Hannes Van Döhren, and Stag by Christian Schwarz.

Your top two procrastination activities?
1. Messing about with Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
2. The Plants vs. Zombies game on my iPhone. It’s very addictive!

Your top two things that start with T?
1. Typefaces.
2. Tria markers.

Not including any people or pets, apropos the catchy studio moniker, tell us the most devastating thing you’ve lost and the most brilliant thing you’ve found…

Most devastating thing I’ve lost: I had the coolest Danger Mouse t-shirt when I was a kid… my Nan sent it to me from the UK. Somehow it disappeared… I was devastated!

Most brilliant thing I’ve found: I managed to infiltrate the new Perth underground railway tunnel a few years back whilst it was still under construction (I was a bit drunk). I found an official WA Rail hard hat and air horn which was pretty cool. That same evening I also infiltrated the old Boans building which was being used as an office by the construction workers at the time. I managed to get into the attic of the building and found a can of oil from the early 1900s.

Finally, show us your work.

International Walkman Day

In the second installment of our Public Holiday Project series, we here at ToneCorp decided to create a series of posters paying tribute to one of humankind’s most amazing inventions to date; the Walkman. 32 years ago today the first Walkman was released to the world and things would never been the same. Though the functionality inherent in the TPS-L2 had been around for some time in professional models for journalists, never had they been collected in a unit affordable for the common music fan. Debuting at ¥33,000 (US$200), to coincide with Sony’s 33rd anniversary the unit was a slow seller at first but quickly gained popularity with an innovative advertising campaign from Sony.

Supposedly Sony Chairman Akio Morita asked his team to create a portable device so that he may listen to his favorite opera’s on his frequent trans-pacific flights. 30 years of court battles and a whole bunch of cash would reveal that Sony may have borrowed the idea pretty heavily from Andreas Pavel’s Steroebelt, first developed in 1972, seven years before the Walkman would debut.

At the end of the day the Walkman was an amazing invention that for the first time in history would allow anyone to completley replace their audio input. No longer did you have to listen to the birds chirping outdoors, your mum telling you to make your bed or oncoming traffic honking as you jaywalk a red light. For the first time you could be in a private space whilst in a public space, a phenomena that would later be termed the “Walkman effect”, something that continues frequently today with iPod listening. Perhaps most importantly, this was the first time you could create your own soundtrack to what you were doing. No longer would you have to watch the Rocky montage with envy, now you could live it.

Today is a day to remember. Today is International Walkman Day.

Ben Hagley and Papa Marcus Design

Studio Lost & Found

Papa Marcus Design

Studio Bomba and Michelle Leslie

Brendan Hibbert Design

Prints available in our Etsy shop soon.

CXXVI

It’s not you, it’s me. I’m really sorry, I’ve been meaning to write but… I’ve been really busy. Really I have… I’m not just saying that. I’ve been thinking about you a lot but have been too involved in my day job, which has also been becoming my night job a lot of late – one of the perils of working for yourself.

Before I forget I should probably mention to those of you that don’t follow our Facebook page that we finally opened our much-anticipated (by us) Etsy shop which has been ticking over nicely in the last couple of months. Almost everything we’ve done is available for sale at this point and we’d like to extend an enthusiastic high-5 to everyone who’s already bought some loot. You can find the link to the shop under ‘Store’ in links menu of our site.

So I haven’t had a chance to print anything lately but I have had the time to spend countless hours if not days trawling the internet for information on African flora & fauna, compelling sandwich photography, bike repair tutorials, and of course a bit of hand lettering. It was during this pilgrimage of procrastination that I managed to track down the work of Jon Contino, an artist whose work I’d been seeing pop up on various blogs over the last couple of years. Whether it’s his work with former design studio One Twenty Six, or his new work with his clothing company CXXVI Clothing Co. (126), this guy has the Midas touch in my opinion.

I’d been eagerly awaiting the relaunch of the CXXVI website as I’d been discovering illustrations from some of the shirts and when it launched 2 days ago I couldn’t have been more impressed. To top it all off it turns out that not only do they do super rad illustrations, but the prints are all hand pulled screen prints. Screen printing anything is enough to make me happy but telling me you hand pull your screens is like telling me: ‘I box without gloves’; ‘I bake cake without flour’; ‘I play banjo… with my mind’. Needless to say, I was pretty excited. Whilst screen printing will give your design a lot of punch, hand pulling your screens is fraught with equal shots of danger and reward as any number of unexpected things can happen on each pull. As CXXVI say on their site; ‘Each shirt is individually printed by hand making no two pieces alike’. The fact of the matter is that it’s a whole lot of fun to print stuff by hand and just see what you end up with.

I can’t wait to earn a few spare clams so I blow them on an order to these guys. You can check out more of the CXXVI Clothing Co. here.

One Twenty Six

CXXVI Clothing Co.

Build your own screenprinting exposure box

Johnny Two Tone Club just added to it’s asset column with a fully custom built 900mm x 600mm light box/exposure box complete with a rack of six Phillips ‘Actinic’ 18W BLACK LIGHTS (from Lamp Replacements Balcatta WA). Glass, lights and materials came to around $250, and the blueprints will be available here soon, however, in the meantime, feast your two-tone eyes on this baby.

Also, good friend and fellow AGDA national committee member Nathanael Jeanneret from Tassie, has released a great PDF for Screenprinting for fun at home.

Direct link to the fact sheet here.

Valentines Cards

With V-Day just around the corner we thought it might be prudent to make some fancy cards for loved up folks to give to the object/objects of their affection. With our patriotism levels feeling comfortably mild, we decided to make the most of Australia Day and try our hands on the endangered Gocco machine.

With no prior experience in this medium myself, our newest Melbourne recruit Painter Girl was good enough to take me under her wing and show me what’s what in this business. With a number of stop starts on my behalf between badly applying my Foam Stoppers and breaching paint, or badly carbon printed artwork I managed to botch things up for most of the day on my ‘I heart Ranga’ design. However, a shared birthday with the Boss has always enriched me with a ‘no retreat, no surrender’ policy so off I trotted to Officeworks, then to KFC, and then finally to a Liberty petrol station that was kind enough to run my designs through the photocopier for maximum carbon density.

Back in business again and approaching sunset rapidly, I powered on and managed to have the best of success in printing my ‘You are Rad’ design, especially victorious as I stayed up until 1am drawing it the night before while my friends watched Top Gun. With everything going smoothly I was beginning to finally feel the fabled ‘Gocco success fever’ everyone was talking about, yep the day was a win after all.

Painter Girl of course was going from strength to strength all day starting with a killer batch of scones and following on to producing her always stellar prints on their signature vintage novel page backgrounds. She’s also released a series of crazy ‘Love Attack’ cards and prints already available from her Etsy shop.

JTTC Items will be available for purchase on our Etsy Store shortly.

International Sputnik Day – Part Two

With the celebration of my Gran’s 90th birthday last month (holy cow right?), I had the perfect excuse to duck back to Perth for the weekend and squeeze in a little get together with the Club.

We’d always intended to print posters from our International Sputnik Day project and since the designs were still on the screens it was an easy decision what to print that weekend. With a tub full of shiny new metallic ink and a couple of new recruits to break in (hi Dan and Bec!), we gave those screens hell for a day and managed to squeeze 2 of our 3 designs out.

All items will be up for sale once we go legit!

JTTC Library: Book 1

The Thames and Hudson Manual of Screen Printing (1979)

This book is a remainder from the Swinburne College Library. How they came to the decision that it should be chucked out, I can’t imagine, because it is an awesome wealth of insane knowledge.

Lots of beautiful information about different ways to join a frame, mesh density, registration … normal stuff like that … plus wonderful random information like “scratch n sniff” inks, flocking and silkscreening food. Rad!

Thames and Hudson Manual to Screen Printing

Eduardo Paolozzi Hooray!

Scratch n Sniff - hello!

mesh! exciting!

a nice excuse to flash a bit of flesh

win! Bridget Riley

Flocking genius

not a vegan method

Interview with Duncan

For the second in our interview series with JTTC club members we thought Mr Duncan Roylance might be a good choice. Duncan is without a doubt the man behind the machine, and by machine I mean a Chandler and Price letterpress machine; “Herbert” to his friends. With Duncan’s help, Herbert is entirely responsible for all of the beautiful letterpress work we’ve been seeing coming out from the folks at Mitchell and Dent. A master of all trades, Duncan has a secret life as a blues musician, a talent for tinkering with old motorbikes, and seems to be determined to invent the next generation of silk screens. Without further ado, Mr Duncan Roylance…

Where are you from?
A time long, long ago, before the tyranny of Federation, when letterpress ruled the known universe.

What’s your day job?
I talk on the phone.

Why screen printing?
Why not screen printing???

Whose screen printing do you most covet?
Banksy – it’s kind of screen printing…

Your top two PMS colours?
Black and mid-grey (it’s the new black).

Your top two songs to screen by?
Can’t print, dancing!!

Your top two blogs?
Mitchell and Dent

Your top two typefaces?
Corona Sterling Portable, IBM Selectric

Your top two procrastination activities?
Hmm, let me see…

Your top two things that start with T?
Tea; and Triumph T140V

In a death match between the Queens left and right hand: Sir James Paul McCartney and Sir Michael Philip “Mick” Jagger, who would win and why?
Mick the Lip Jagger; he’s got too much of da blues for pretty boy Pauly. Though these days it’s hard to tell ‘em apart…

Finally, show us your work

Screening stuff other than paint

I’ve been noticing a lot of clever chickens lately who’ve been screening all sorts of stuff other than paint. It never would have occurred to me to put anything other than the finest (maybe not always the finest) paints through my precious screens but after seeing some of the inventive things that other folks have been doing, I’m starting to think again and brew all sorts of crazy ideas. Here’s a couple of projects from FPO and Eye Magazine that I’ve been digging in particular.

We Freak on My Jeep by Excuses Design Collective
In a nutshell, these guys basically exposed their image onto their screens, then screened glue through the silk, quickly washed it out their screens and then poured hundreds and thousands over the print to stick to the glue. They even screened the “Beep Beep” part separately in a gloss varnish.

Pretty amazing stuff.

Read the full article here.

Oil and Water do not mix by Anthony Burrill with Happiness Brussels
Mr Anthony Burrill marched himself down to the polluted beaches of Grand Isle, Louisiana with bucket and spade and (easily) collected enough oil to use as a paint to screen these amazing posters.

Burrill comments: ‘There is a perception among many people that the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is just going to somehow disappear … For people in the Gulf, including Louisiana, the effects of this disaster will be around for a long time.’

Read the full article here.

Interview with Papa Marcus

We know we’ve been a little mysterious, sending off unsigned tea towels and the like. It’s about time we properly introduced ourselves, don’t you think?

Here is the first in our series of JTTC member interviews. Please put your hands together for Johnny Two Tone Club founder and Melbourne branch president, Papa Marcus (interviewed by fellow Two Toner, Michelle).

Where are you from?
Perth, WA.

What’s your day job?
At the moment I’m trying to make a go of being a self employed Graphic Designer in Melbourne and run my company Papa Marcus Design. I’ve only just moved here so I reckon I’ll be washing car windows at the traffic lights before you know it. They still use a squeegee you know.

Why screen printing?
I love the immediacy of the thing. Dragging a wad of neon ink accross a sheet of paper and seeing how that lifts off the page just gives me a real kick. There’s something really exciting to me in reviewing each draw of the squeegee as it happens. It sure beats offering your printer a bowl of rice and a high resolution pdf, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. I also really enjoy working with a limited colour palette and seeing what you can do with that.

Whose screen printing do you most covet?
Jay Ryan, Morning Breath, Print Liberation, Andrio Abero, Ghost Town Design, Delicious Design League, do I have to choose only one?

Your top two PMS colours?
Pantone 310c, Pantone 108c

Your top two songs to screen by?
“Magical Colours” by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and “Please Don’t Touch” by Motörhead

Your top two blogs?
For Print Only (underconsideration.com/fpo) and Batblog (tomztoyz.blogspot.com)

Your top two typefaces?
I really love Eames at the moment and I’ve been a big fan of whatever the typeface is that the Print Liberation guys use on literally everything they do. I think it’s handmade because all the weights are really odd and irregular. I love it!

Your top two procrastination activities?
l spend ages trying to level up my dork abilities by reading forums on computer issues I’m having in order to actually avoid more pressing things. I also like to drink a highly unmanly amount of tea.

Your top two things that start with T?
TED talks, The Walking Dead (super super awesome comic book)

What’s your earliest memory of making art?
I think it was a ticket I “designed” when I was in Primary School. There was a competition to design a poster for the school play ‘The Flying Pieman’, if I remember correctly. This other guy (his mum actually) won it and got his drawing on the poster but mine was runner up so it became the ticket art. I can’t imagine the shape of the ticket that it would work for both. My mum told me that not everyone would see the poster, but everyone coming to the show would have to see my ticket. Good words Mum.

Finally, show us your work…