I recently made this fun strawberry postcard for Postcard Club and shared the inspiration and process for making it on my Patreon. I’m sharing it here, too!
“Food” is the guiding theme for the images I make for Postcard Club. Once a month I come up with a new image that is related to food and make a screen printed postcard of it. Postcards are then mailed to Patrons.
For March’s image, I was studying still lifes and came across Andy Warhol's Space Fruit series (1978 – 1979). Here some of them are in my copy of Andy Warhol "Giant" Size:
About Space Fruit, from warhol.org:
Throughout his career, Warhol worked with assistants and printers to create numerous print portfolios. In 1977 he met printer Rupert Jasen Smith who worked with him to create the series Space Fruit. These prints demonstrate Warhol’s experimentation with a centuries-old genre in painting—the still life. Still lifes by their very nature are choreographed compositions focusing on shape, color, space, and oftentimes symbolism. Warhol was interested in using shadows as a compositional element. He first placed one or more pieces of fruit on a white background, lit the arrangement from an angled position so that shadows were cast onto the white paper, and then photographed these compositions. He also used collage and drawing to create the source imagery for the additional screens used in each print. This artwork is an example of a multilayer or multicolor silkscreen print since each color represents a different silkscreened layer. This printing process allowed Warhol endless color combinations within each composition.
There isn't a lot about Rupert Jasen Smith on the internet, but I looked him up in Blake Gopnik's book Warhol, which describes how Smith ran a down & dirty print shop out of his loft apartment in NYC and mostly took care of client correspondence, while employees pulled most of the prints. It sounds like they would show Warhol just the transparency films as a proof for approval and then pull dozens of prints in different colors that Warhol would then choose and approve for the final edition.
Here's a photo I took in 2019 of one of Warhol's transparencies with his notes to his printer all over them — as a screen printer this was really exciting to see:
Gopnik's book also says Smith's "print shop" was unventilated and mentions the use of noxious chemicals and solvents, which are not ideal workplace conditions, but perhaps answers a question I had about what inks were used to make these prints.
I found a high-res photo of "Peaches" (one of the Space Fruits), which helped me tear apart the layers and figure out how the print was potentially made:
I wondered about the ink because each of these layers appears to be printed on top of each other, and the colors are vibrant but also opaque. Water-based opaque colors can be a little dull because they tend to have a lot of white in them. To get around that you set up your layers to have "knockouts" (shapes knocked out of the layer so white paper remains, and then you print on top of bare paper instead of a background color).
But you can see from the closeup below that the colors were printed on top of each other because the underlayers are slightly visible. This is an easier way to print because you don't have to worry as much about registering/lining up all the layers to each other.
In addition to the flat color layers (background, peach shapes, shadows), there is a halftone layer and a drawing layer. The halftone layer would have been created from Warhol's photograph of the still life mentioned above — halftones are how you get photographic detail in a screen print. The drawing layer reminds me of grease pencil banana drawings I made for some of last month's images.
I don't have the ability to print photographic halftones right now, but I can fake it with india ink impressions, which I did for this strawberry image:
With the india ink impressions, I was able to create something like a halftone texture of the strawberries — that’s the hot pink layer in the final print below:
This was the postcard I sent out to Patrons for April, inspired by Warhol’s Space Fruit. If you’re interested in this kind of content every week and/or getting a screen printed postcard in the mail every month, join my Patreon! Just $5/month.