Artwork evolution - coffee zombie

Tuesday, 10 March 2009 00:00

The inspiration for this print came from the fact that, with a small baby waking up in the night, my partner and I only managed to function by drinking a cafetierre of industrial strength extreme coffee before crawling out of bed.

Our brains would only function by pouring in a black caffeine infusion thick enough "to trot a mouse in" (as my grandma would say)

So came the idea for Coffee Zombies. The feeling of needing extreme caffeine just to become human.

As usual I started to sketch the rough basics in my sketchbook and refined the main zombie imaage by using tracing paper to work over previous versions until I got the shape and feel right.

I then scanned the image on the tracing paper and imported into Adobe Illustrator.

Using a Graphics Tablet and pen I drew over the scanned image in Illustrator to give it further definition. I added some texture to the stroke to further develop the image. Once I was happy with the basic shape I imported it into Adobe Photoshop.

In Photoshop I worked on the layout adding in the text and paint splatters to give background texture. I also experimented with different colourways.

The next step was to the prepare the separations for print ( a different black template for each colour to be printed) and send them to the printers for output.

As usual the final stage is the wonderful hands on process of handpulling the image via screenprinting onto paper.

Printing Coffee Zombies was quite a cathartic process. Thankfully now my child is a little older, sleeps much more soundly and I have managed to go through cold turkey and wean myself onto extreme coffee at the weekends only.