urbanprey: behind the scenes

Showing posts with label behind the scenes. Show all posts

Laser cutter in action

Finally found some time to start up our laser cutter/engraver. Here we engrave our logo on the back of wooden brooches - these will soon be available in our etsy store. We are looking forward to use the awesome Emblaser-1 from Darklylabs more often in the future ...

Printing tote bags for Fett & Zucker

Today we printed some tote bags for our friends from Fett & Zucker, a wonderful coffee and cake shop, which we frequently visit.

Click on the image for more pics.

Gift Tag - Making of

No more dog-ears

We updated our notebooks once again. To prevent worn out looking corners after heavy use, we decided to round them off. We already had a corner puncher, but since it is only capable of punching one sheet at a time it would take us forever to finish just one book with 30 sheets ... So welcome the latest addition to our ever growing machine park: "The Warrior", capable of punching a stack of paper of 10mm.

Here is a glimpse at our working process:

Spiral bound notebooks

Catfight design process

Click on the image above to see a gallery of the design stages for a t-shirt project we abandoned. It's again a play on words: the literal interpretation of a catfight. Since so much time went into this we want to at least present it here. Enjoy!

Screenprinting the Veggie Bag

Unused Moth-Invasion Designs

Here are some alternative designs for our "Invasion of the Moths" T-Shirt. I still like the version with the old movie theater. We didn't use it because the single posters would have been too small on the T.

The process behind the Strawberry Heart illustration

Although I am the type of person that faints by the mere sight of blood, injection needles or any surgical instruments, I have been obsessed with anatomical and medical illustrations for a long time. Two of my favorite books are the ones shown here, "Medical and Anatomical Illustrations" (Dover Pictorial Archives) and "Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery" (Taschen). The first one has over two thousand black-and-white illustrations from the field of medicine and anatomy, from clip-art-style to very detailed renderings, from the late Victorian era through the early 20th century, whereas the latter is probably THE most beautiful anatomical atlas ever published with beautiful hand-colored plates (the original dates back to the middle of the 19th century, it was two decades in the making). I am so glad Taschen released this in an affordable regular version (it is still huge and heavy!).

So I used these two books as reference for my drawing. First I drew just hearts which was nice to practice drawing but it got boring. I realized that the shape of a heart and a strawberry are quite similar, so here I was...

The drafts from the early stages were pretty crappy, as you can see. Somewhere in the process it dawned on me to use a real-life strawberry as model (it is really embarrassing not to have thought of this earlier!). When I was satisfied with the final piece Mario helped me digitalize the image and use a filter to make it look like a drawing from my books.

And.....finally printed on a shirt.

New Design "Dart Vader" - Making of

I like bad plays on words, so after "Dart Agnan", this is the next entry in my Dart related designs (more to come - fear the worst ;-)). The first draft was rejected (by my better half) because the legs didn't look right and the birds eye viewpoint didn't provide a menacing pose. I liked the next draft better, but wasn't happy with the weight of the lines, so I started over again and finalized the 3rd version. Separating the colors for the laser-effect was a bit tricky, but it turned out quite good.

At first I wanted to print everything that's white with a special glow-in-the-dark ink, but applying it only to the "lightdart" made more sense in the end.