Eddie Vedder 2011 US Tour Triptych

(click any image to see larger)

I had an idea to create a triptych poster set with the first and last shows of the tour, with the middle one being the US Tour poster. I am lucky that there's some great people working EV's merch and they went for it! The three posters show the acoustic, electric and ukulele guitars Eddie uses during his performance. It was important to me to get his guitars looking right, so I worked from photos of his gear. The drawings were all done by hand in ink on bristol and then scanned in and colored using Photoshop and my trusty Wacom. These are probably my most time intensive and detailed prints I've worked on so far. Working on and off, each one of these took a week to finish, but the end result is worth it I think. Originally it was a triptych with state birds featured, but I think this turned out much better!

The Providence print represents the beginning, the morning hours, the sun rising in the East. The middle tour poster shows L.A. and NYC silhouettes, showing the travel across the states. The Seattle poster is the end of the tour, the night has come and the day is over. I decided to keep the "Eddie Vedder" lettering somewhat hidden, or at least not the first thing you see. I tried some new things (new to me) with the screenprinting, trying to take advantage of bitmapping to make gradients, and overlapping colors to create subtle color shifts. I'm going to keep pushing myself, I really love screenprinting.

 

I got to watch Eddie Vedder perform at the Long Beach show a few weeks ago and it was pretty rad! He's got some great fans! They cheered when he finished a song, cheered when he picked up his electric guitar, cheered at the first strum, then cheered when he began to sing. Loud cheers, deafening even! I really dig Eddie's guitar work, in particular his "Into The Wild" soundtrack. I probably ended up listening to it about ten times while I worked on these three prints. I read some comments about not "getting it" with the first poster.  That's cool, when you make art not everyone gets it. Eddie's song are about a lot of different things, relationships, places, life experiences, and I was trying to capture some of those things in the prints. I never approach these gig posters as advertisements for the band, the venue, the locale, etc. Maybe that's the wrong approach, but first and foremost I'm making a piece of art. I'm trying to take the essence of what the musician does and mix it with what I do. I like his storytelling abilities, and I think I am a storyteller as well, only visually rather than auditory. There's stories in these pieces, as there are in all of my works.

The last two prints will be available at www.potatostamp.com this week. I will have more info and specifics on here tomorrow for those interested....