Chris Summerlin

I mainly do one off posters for the Damn You! collective. I also do stuff for Rock City, Rescue Rooms and The Social. Often they want to impress a band and give the posters to them as a present. 

 

I work with big flat-blocked colour with no outlines, almost photographic, looking quite polished. Or I do quite detailed pen drawings of something. 

 

I try to keep what I do separate to those boutique posters that don’t ever really get put up for a gig. I want to do something for normal people. There is an art involved in doing it but really they are just pieces of advertising that I try to make look as attractive as I can. 

 

Kia Wong. He specialises in drawing that looks like a very talented twelve-year-old has drawn it. So it’s not quite right but it looks really, really amazingly slaved over. 

 

I did one for Lee Rosy’s Tea Shop for the banjo player Daniel Higgs. I had thirty screen printed on recycled paper. It was really porous, like sugar paper. If you had a bag of chips and touched it you would be able to see right through it! 

 

Part of the reason I wanted to do it was that only the bigger bands, venues and promoters could afford to have a poster designer. I want to do stuff, for example charge £50 for a poster and let them do what they want with it. At the moment if I have a week’s worth of work and don’t really sleep, I still don’t really make that much money out of it. I’ve just started doing wedding invites for people though.

 

I’ve done a few record sleeves for people and it seems to be a format that works really well because they are usually quite bright and bold. There is a big market in America for people doing posters designs for bands. Maybe the posters that are designed in England for American bands don’t really get noticed as much? 

 

People in America have merchandising companies that handle every last piece of sold paraphernalia that relates to the band and they will commission people to do posters for them. It tends to be an America-centered thing. 

 

You can’t make a bad band good just by having something that looks visually interesting. But if you have a band that is interesting in the first place, a good piece of artwork can tie the package together. 

 

I was at All Tomorrow's Parties and there was a kid who had a t-shirt with my Herman Dune poster design on the front of it. I asked where he got it. He said from this guy knocking about on Camden market, so I still haven't got to the bottom of this. I've got to make a stealthy visit down to Camden and take a load of burly men with me.