DKNG makes a poster

The Los Angeles-based creative duo walks us through the process of creating a screen printed poster.

DKNG is Dan Kuhlken and Nathan Goldman, a pair of creative dudes whose projects range from screen printed posters to web design to giant wooden installations. We met them at the Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco and were immediately drawn to their bright, bold work. As part of their diverse and expansive portfolio of client work, Dan and Nathan have been resident poster artists at Hollywood’s famous Troubadour since 2007.

Dan was kind enough to share the duo’s process of a poster they recently completed for the band Phish. Read on for a step-by-step walk through what it takes to create a fabulous screen printed poster.

Item name: Phish 2010 Tour Poster
Dimensions: 17″ x 22″
Method of printing: Four-color screen print
Designer: DKNG Studios (Dan Kuhlken & Nathan Goldman)
Printer: Monolith Press
Inked used: SpeedBall Acrylic
Paper: 80# Classic Crest Welsh Blue
Run Size: 1000, signed and numbered
Available: $50 online

The idea behind the poster was to incorporate elements of Phish’s positive musical vibe and the venue/location of their show (The Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin). We decided that a bottle of milk containing the venue’s scenery (in a more fantastical style) would represent both nicely. The venue itself has very iconic architecture which helped us in deciding on a style, which ended up being a series of very simple shapes. The venue’s location is known for its rolling hills and reminiscent quality of the Swiss Alps. So we decided to include in our scenery both rolling hills with flowers and pine trees along with a towering snowy mountain in the background. Above is a rough sketch of the scenery.

This is our initial composition. It was a bit too simple for the final poster so we decided to add a bit more dimension to the bottle itself to give the foreground more depth without taking away from the iconic style.

After adding some variation to the glass of the bottle we also decided to make the cap red to help the name “Phish” stand out. The original idea was to have the sun’s rays of the bottle’s interior blasting out of the top of the bottle. However…

We decided that bubbles/milk releasing out of the top had a more kinetic aesthetic and would make more sense to the viewer in the long run. Above is the final artwork.

Once the design was completed we sent the file to our good friends at Monolith Press. Above is a snap shot of their office/studio.

Another shot of the Monolith Press studio.

…and another.

Nathan in the studio next to Monolith’s ink selection.

Here is pic of me getting ready (stretching) to sign and number 1000 posters. This is the most posters we have ever had to sign. So, to help us with the process we decided to include the number 1000 in each print along with a blank area for the number within the edition to reduce the amount of time and labor.

The poster is a four-color screen print, but with the color of paper and the use of overprinting we achieved seven total colors in the poster!

We managed to create two shades of green by having the under print of the green either be yellow and white or just the paper itself. The darkest color was a combination of the yellow, red and green printed directly on the paper color. And in order to keep the vibrance in the yellow and red we printed those over the initial layer of white ink.

So all in all the order of inks printed on the blue paper went as follows: white, yellow, red then green.

Ta-da! These fabulous posters are available in the DKNG online shop. Nice work, guys!