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.
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