Poster Art (Self-Reliance)

Since I decided to make the blog about my observations/musings as well as my activities in the scene, I thought it would be neat to discuss a bit about why I decided to start doing show flyers in a certain way.

When I began doing shows, I really liked getting various friends to do the flyers. This is for many reasons; I have many talented friends who excell at graphic design, I thought it would be a neat way to expose different styles of art to different groups of people, I myself am awful with a computer et cetera.

However, I began realizing that in many cases, I couldn't express what I wanted properly, I sometimes had to fall on the same friends because others would flake out blah blah blah. I started thinking about how a major tenant of my project was 'self-reliance.' I have always been a strong believer of 'rely on no one, get screwed by no one.' Not to say that I don't receive any help (I do, a great deal from my very gracious friends), but in terms of overall responsibility, I am accountable only to myself, and prefer it that way.

In terms of show flyers, I have always loved the simple but effective aesthetic of cut/paste/scan. I realized that not only was this a style that I (and anyone) could do, but that it was also a lot of fun. I've only been doing them since May, and have mostly stayed in the area of old classic horror movie stills. Growing up, many of these images were captivating to me, and I like the way they play off the information being glued/taped onto them. Most importantly, the posters are quick, easy, effective and cheap.

Being solely responsible for the creation of my own flyers has been very enjoyable. I'll never claim to be inventing a style (far from it, I'm basking in a very classic one), but I hope to grow with it and play with the format here and there. It's also quite fun to use the access to a high quality scanner at my work for something of mine on my downtime.

Overall, I think just the sense of being responsible for getting my own shit done is the most rewarding part. I really hope one day I'll find a copy of a flyer I do lying around a friends room, or stuck to the wall of a bedroom or venue. Every show I've run has been really rewarding in one way or another, and having certain images associated with each one almost adds to the pleasant memories.

Enough talk, here are some of the poorly done images I'm speaking of.

Babble at ya next time.

-Matt