Today I’m sharing the behind-the-scenes process I went through to complete a recent screen printed postcard commission for an Airstream Airbnb in Detroit!
The client for this project reached out to me a few months ago about creating a screen printed postcard for her vintage but newly renovated Airstream’n’B, the Airstream Dream, a beautiful Airstream you can stay in when you’re visiting Detroit. The postcards would be left inside the Airstream for visitors to send to family and friends at home (and, advertise the Airstream!). All of which sounded like a cool idea to me.
I visited the Airstream (while it was still a WIP) to take photos and start getting ideas.
I used the top photo above to draw the Airstream, which would become the base of the design:
I would be making the image digitally in Photoshop (Team Raster here! I suck at Illustrator but I've been using Pshop since the mid-90s), which I’ve done a lot of in the past but haven’t much lately, mostly because I don’t have easy access to a transparency printer anymore. But honestly I like the scrappy, handmade way that I work now. It’s just not appropriate for all projects, like this one. (Ocelot Print Shop printed the transparencies for me! I got friends in screen printy places!)
I usually start a new project with tons of research to find a path forward. I start googling and collecting images and dropping them in Old Timey Pinterest: a folder on my computer desktop. I researched vintage Airstream ads to get a feel for how Airstreams have been portrayed visually and in a way meant to entice people (via advertising):
One thing I noticed in all of them is that the Airstream’s door is always open, so I made the door open in the design.
I researched vintage travel posters to get a feel for visuals:
I researched vintage postcard backs for the design on the back (though I ended up going with something really simple):
I researched vintage postcards of Detroit, but they were full of cars and industry (which makes sense for the time). I liked the idea of a postcard from Detroit that felt homey and had greenery, just like the land surrounding the Airstream.
Trying to stick to a 3-color design, digitally I ended up here:
The influence of the Beijing poster above can be seen in the sun, the influence of the Brookfield Zoo poster can be seen in the wavy green lines, and the influence of vintage big letter postcards can be seen in the lettering. The client asked that inside and outside details of the Airstream be included in the design — I really wanted to include the cool pattern on the door (scroll up for photo), but the image was too small to accommodate that, especially because it was going to be screen printed, AND in metallic silver ink (ya gotta print the Airstream in metallic silver ink). Metallics are more difficult to print and they dry up in the screen when things get too tiny. The size of the print (4.25” x 5.5”) restricted what kinds of tiny details I could include.
But I used the below stained glass horseshoe that was going in the Airstream's skylight as inspiration for the embellishments on the letters of “Detroit”:
And pulled those same white flowers into the greenery around the Airstream.
So once the design was done, it was time to print! I did some ink tests for the colors, especially to see how the metallic ink was going to interact with the other colors in terms of overlays:
And started printing:
Here’s an animation of the print sequence:
Registration was super tight and there were so many tiny details (this tends to happen with digital designing — you can zoom in and trick yourself into spaciousness), so I used the transparency method for registration, making sure everything lined up for each print:
And that’s it! It was a super fun project and my first commission in a while, so I was happy with how well it went.
I’m available for other commissioned projects — contact me to talk about the details.