Our Desert Rose Dragon print will be in the Pinchflat Bike Poster Show in Columbus!

Our second print, "Desert Rose Dragon" will be at the 2014 Columbus Pinchflat show in May. Pinchflat now spans four months and will have posters on display at Paradise Garage, Roll: Bicycles, Baer Wheels, and Cafe Brioso in Columbus, Ohio. The opening party is at Wild Goose Creative on May 3, 2014.  Pinchflat is an original bike poster show in Columbus that chooses 30 artists who create 30 prints each that sell for $30 a pop. We're excited that we made it into the show again this year.

"Desert Rose Dragon" is a 12" x 24", 3-color silkscreen print on French paper. This year we had Shout Out Loud Prints silkscreen them for us. We're really happy with how much of the detail was retained on the printed piece. Thanks for the awesome print job Pat!!

The bicycle in the print was my first bike as a kid, a Huffy Desert Rose with a super cool and comfy banana seat. My sister and I got the same bike that year for Christmas. My parents had this weird notion that if we got the same exact toys that we wouldn't fight over who got the coolest doll, game, or bike. That plan ultimately backfired on them when one of the identical items would break & we fought over which one of us it belonged to :D To this day I still put my name on everything I own :)

I had to wait until Spring to ride my pretty pink Desert Rose bike, which felt like an excruciatingly long time since I was a kid. I had never ridden a bike before, so I thought my parents would give me more of a lessen than they did. They pretty much said "Get on and peddle." That seemed simple enough. I managed to spin the wheels once before I fell off into the ditch in front of our house. That wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that we lived in the country where everyone had septic tanks and smelly ditches that were quickly dug by backhoes. So I had to crawl out of a 3 foot deep ditch, covered in black gunk. My parents found this surprisingly hilarious, so I stormed off and said I was never getting on my bike again. After soaking in our retro pink bathtub with my clothes on, I put on a clean pair of pants and went back out to give it another go. So "never again" lasted about 10 minutes! I hopped on and rode all the way down the street without falling off (my parents skimped on training wheels). I think I was determined to not have my parents snicker at me again. 

I recently recounted that story to my dad who not surprisingly didn't remember it at all. Maybe he would've remembered it if he fell into a ditch and had someone laugh at him?

So why the dragon? We thought it would be neat to have a dragon doing a BMX style bike trick. I didn't think about how long it would take to draw the scales on the dragon. It was exhausting. And 42 hours later, our second print was completed :)

Keep up to date on the show with our art blog:

zinggia.com

"Desert Rose Dragon" silkscreen print 

Alison's initial sketch... I got tired of sketching the dragon's scales too!

Jason did a sketch too. I ended up combining elements from each sketch for the final print. I create the art digitally in Illustrator using a 10-year old mouse instead of a tablet ('cause I'm old skool and stoopid).