Johnny Two Tone Club

Hell yeah Gocco

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.

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!

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Proposed Public Holiday Project #1: International Day of Sputnik

The world’s first Earth-orbiting space satellite was launched on the 4th of October 1957 by the Soviet Union, sounding the starting pistol for the space race between Russia and the United States of America. Catching America by surprise, the panic and paranoia sparked by this crazy little gadget resulted in the US going giddyup and a few decade of one-upmanship ensued.

Let’s give Sputnik the positive PR it so rightly deserved and dipped out on. Why not take the day off today and orbit around a vodka-based beverage of your choice. I’m sure JTTC will petition the boss on your behalf.

Origins of Johnny

Back before we’d fully formed as a club and had all the necessary conversations about membership rings and other basic club rights, we use to like to experiment with Riso a fair bit. Whilst having a dig through some old projects I came up with this little gem of a Valentines Card which I made earlier this year (2010), to woo a girl called Penny.

Penny had quite the affection for the odd zombie film as it turns out. So being the romantic bastard I am, I thought what better way to profess my feelings than an anonymous, but relatively obvious Valentine card depicting the two of us as zombies, in the clothes we first met in, and offering our hearts to each other. It was a risky bet to say the least.

I even illustrated her wearing a pair of awesome hand silk screened stockings that I purchased and mailed to her in the coming weeks after V Day.

Needless to say, everything went well and Johnny got Penny.

Simone & Girlfunkle Merchandise

We’ve been so busy of late working on our soon to be released top secret project that we just about forgot to tell you about what we’ve just finished, and that’s printing the Simone & Girlfunkle merchandise for their launch at Manhattan’s last month. These Perth starlets have been concocting their dark folk meets calypso pop sounds for a few years now with a rapidly growing fan base of late. When they approached JTTC with the invitation to print hankies, pillow slips and oversized under garmets, the offer was too good to resist.

Proffesional photography by Kristinn Hermanniusson.

Krstnn Hrmnsn

Drum roll please…

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I have the immense pleasure of introducing you to the Johnny Two Tone Club.

We are a collective of art and design folk who are having fun experimenting and muddling our way through the world of screen printing. We are bursting at the seams with project ideas and looking forward to sharing them with you in this very spot.

In the meantime, here are some things we prepared earlier on our Facebook page.