Don’t Let ‘Em Grind You Down

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A happy little reminder to keep fighting when the world is trying to grind you down. An illustrated hand lettered print for Light Grey Art Labs’ motivational poster show You Can Do It, Put Your Back Into It.

For this piece I wanted to capture the quality of my prints from the Versus project, so I chose to stay off the computer and use a similar process for this poster. After exploring a bunch of concepts, I decided on one that juxtaposed the roughneck sentiment of the saying, with a more sweet execution. From my thumbnails I sketched out a larger rough to work from. I inked the letters on velum and used Ruby-lith and ink to construct the flowers and outer shape. From there I arranged my elements on the screens before exposing them. Then printed on some course paper to capture that nice screenprinted texture. I had fun mixing the ink and playing with colors, and I was really satisfied with the way they turned out.