High Visibility Style.
For city cyclists, the key to staying safe is being seen. And while bike commuters regular turn to retina-searing shades of yellow for their reflective gear, Washington DC artist JD Deardourff takes the hi-viz ethos across the entire color spectrum in his work.
In-your-face design is nothing new for JD, who’s made a name for himself with a portfolio that features splashy colors, dynamic lines and loud action across the board. At the intersection of madcap and abstract, JD’s unique style of Marvel Comics-inspired visual storytelling sets up shop.
“My style is colorful, lowbrow, painterly screen prints,” explains JD. “It’s overkill. Like a rainbow during sharknando.” A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, JD has created artwork for everything from snowboards to album covers, mixing his unique brand of abstract collage with clients’ vision to deliver. And he certainly didn’t go the subtle route with his poster for ARTCRANK’s inaugural DC show.
Getting (Back to) Rad.
Above all, JD knew he wanted his contribution to ARTCRANK’s Washington DC debut to stand out. Thankfully, this meant all he had to do is stick with what he knows: Saturated hues, high contrast and noisy effects. And considering that JD’s preferred bike ride includes as many steep downhills as possible, it was a safe bet that his poster would push the limits right from the get-go.
To find creative inspiration for his work, JD often turns to collages. He fancies himself something of a hoarder (not the crazy kind), as he’s constantly cutting pages out of magazines, comics, and gluing them together, along with personal photos and sketches.
“In my collages I often remove the positive space information from comic pages until I’m left with the vocabulary of comic book art that really interests me,” explains JD. “Exaggeration, movement, energy, the interplay of sequential imagery, black contour line, and, most importantly, artificial color. Before computers, separators colored comics by hand using a four-color (CMYK) method. I use screen-printing to mimic this process.”
As he began piecing together a bike-inspired collection, JD came across an ad for the 1986 BMX racing film Rad — a film perhaps best known for this unlikely dance-off sequence, as well as a pop culture touchstone for bike fanatics of a certain age. And that was all the impetus he needed to put ink to paper.
Going Big With Bikes and Ink.
“My poster quickly became an homage to Rad,” he says, “I altered the original movie poster and made a psychedelic mountainous, outer space landscape collage out of found photographs for the background.”
To truly be rad, JD pulled out all the stops and pushed the envelope as an artist, printing five colors and employing old-school screenprinting techniques like the “rainbow roll,” which uses two colors and pulls out a third as they mix on the printing roll, creating a colorful gradient effect unique to the process.
“I try to go big on the bike and in the studio, so this was the perfect opportunity to smash the two together,” JD says. “I used a handful of tricks that I keep in my back pocket to push the limits and maximize the space I had. I printed the cyan, magenta and black layers of a CMYK process, with white, yellow, and pink/orange rainbow highlights. It’s a fluorescent harmony.”
For the past four years, ARTCRANK has worked with Neenah Paper to offer our artists access to new choices in fine papers for screen-printed and letterpress posters. In 2014 we’re following four artists from each of our U.S. shows as they develop their ideas and print them on a Neenah Paper stock. We’ll post these behind-the-scenes poster stories after each event, and share more exclusive content on Neenah Paper’s Against The Grain blog.