The Riff Raff

As previously indicated here (thx Asb), Hurray For The Riff Raff is playing at here Front Room Gallery next Monday, the 11th of October. Samuel Doores and The Tumbleweeds, and The Crooked River Blues Band are also playing. It promises to be a great night of beautiful and raspy warm heartfelt folk and blues music.

As is indicated on this poster, I'll be giving away a limited print of the artwork from this poster, exclusive to this show, to anybody that comes and donates $5 at the door. These donations will be going directly to the touring bands.

This is what the print will look like, it's 11" x 17":


I feel like I did a decent job representing this show with this poster. I'm pretty happy with this leaf business. It's another fall, another autumn, here in the heart of it all. As much as I already dread the oncoming Ohio winter months, I'm very happy that the summer has given up and gone the way of things that go away.



It's not necessarily a part of a series, but I think of this piece as a companion to the Lightning Bolt poster from earlier this year. Thematically, we're looking at size disparities and power dynamics. It's about relationships to environments and strength versus delicateness*. They're one and the same. Nature, working with characters to develop balance and build a texture scape.



I inked this mostly with a brush. I used a .01 micron pen for some of the hatching and details, but mostly, it's all brushwork. The original is 14" x 17", ink on Bristol board. There's something good about drawing bigger.



This splatter is one of three layers of splatter I used while coloring this piece. Multitudes of layers, piled on top of each other. Things get interesting. Like these leaves, like time.



I really like how this text turned out. It's fun to play with ascenders and descenders. It's fun to play with serifs, to warp letters, to make them fit. Everything makes sense if you look at it all together. Sometimes, it's so much worth it to spend the extra few minutes and draw some thought out text rather than blast it out and go bonkers with it.

Any time I hear the words "Riff Raff", I almost always think of the film "Rififi".

I think I'm going to print a handful of really huge versions of the art in black and white, to sell at the show (again, money going to the bands). At 24" x 36", it'll look like this:



Here's a video of Hurray For The Riff Raff playing at a house called The Secret Garden, I think. It's a pretty great video:

Hurray for the Riff Raff at the Secret Garden #2 from hoovesontheturf (sarahana) on Vimeo.

*I had no idea delicateness was a word until I typed it in and the spell check aspect of Firefox didn't indicate that it wasn't.