I’m excited. Seriously. I’m really excited about this new line of work I’m doing: a series of limited edition silkscreen prints celebrating classic bars of New York City. The first is the beautiful joint Sunny’s Bar that just reopened almost a year after Sandy flooded the bejesus out of it and most of the Red Hook neighborhood, Brooklyn’s original waterfront/dockworker’s district just south of where I live now (think On the Waterfront). In fact, until well into the post-war period, many of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods fell under the name “Red Hook,” from those brawny docks all the way up to the border of Brooklyn Heights, including what’s now known as Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill. So take that, trendy real estate brokers. ‘Course there’s caché in the Red Hook neighborhood now. No one would have seen that coming a couple decades ago, but here we are. Red Hook is dynamite, and Sunny’s is one of the great good places that makes it that way.

The Silkscreen Process for Sunny’s Bar

First I take pictures of a place I want to draw. Like this one of Sunny’s Bar, which I did on Colleen’s birthday earlier this year, a white-sky day at the tail end of winter, with chilly wet wind blowing off the harbor, clumps of snow smacking down like pigeon crap. Perfect for a clean shot of Sunny’s (still closed from Sandy, but with the promise of music and warmth beneath the gloom) on a slick cobblestone street.

Then it’s time to sketch. The idea is to crop the composition (to a 3:4 ratio, for easy printing/framing) and loosely but accurately catch the angles and personality of the place (and I’m including the surroundings, wires and all) in a quick sketch. This one I inked, for practice.

Now it’s time for the final inking of Sunny’s Bar. This is where I  pare it down, simplifying it somewhat but still retaining the feel I want. These will be only the black lines of the final print.

Then I pick one or two spot colors. Accuracy is less important than capturing mood. I went with a calm brick red and a muted green. I got them from a Pantone book, which contains accurate representations of colors universally used in the printing trade, so you know what you’re getting, as opposed to choosing a color off your computer screen, which could lead to variation given differences between your screen, say, and your printer’s. With Pantones (variation in ocular perception notwithstanding), you know what you should get, and the printers will try to match the color they mix for you with the one in their Pantone book.

Now it’s time for the color separations, which I draw by hand with tracing paper then scan and format in Photoshop. These will be the screens that the red and green will be applied with. I try not to overdo it with these colors. I just want enough to add something to the feel of the piece, and highlight the subject: Sunny’s Bar.

I then get these three files, along with the Pantone colors, to the printer via email or Dropbox. I’m currently working with the folks at Gowanus Print Lab here in Brooklyn. They’re a five minute bike ride from my house and I took poster printing classes there last winter. I include a mockup of what the final will look like as well, so they have an idea of how the finished product should look. But they don’t all have to be spot-on. In fact, I like to get a few copies with the registration a little bit off so the colors don’t line up perfectly. People like this. It shows the human touch.

After going to GPL and okaying the colors they’ve mixed for Sunny’s Bar, we’re ready to roll. I’m using good heavyweight acid-free paper with a deckled (torn-looking) edge. Size: 16″ by 20″ with the image at 12″ by 16″, giving a nice two-inch border all the way around. 16 by 20 is good since it fits in a standard size frame, therefore more affordable than some goofball size you’d have to get custom made. You could even put a two-inch matte around it and still get away with a standard frame: 18″ by 24″.

And here’s how it looks framed:

More to come. Next up, an Ann Arbor piece for the Ann Arbor Art Center: the Law Quad.