I have long adored the work of The husband and wife duo (James and Melissa Buchanan) that comprise the famed Little Friends of Printmaking. Not only are they incredibly talented but a true joy to talk to. Who else can make you want to get married and set about spending all your days covered in ink with the one you love? Come along for the ride as we chit chat like only kind folks from Wisconsin can.

How Did You Find Yourselves In The Printmaking Business?
M: We studied printmaking in college, at the University of Wisconsin. That’s where we started Little Friends. At first, Little Friends was a print collective that put on exhibitions. The exhibitions were fairly popular events on campus, but eventually everyone else peeled off from the group or bailed on us (which is pretty much the story of every art collective in history), which just left the two of us.

JW: At some point, a concert promoter who knew our work, or at least knew the art events we’d done asked us if we wanted to do some concert posters.

M: This was about the time that Dan and Michael from Aesthetic Apparatus split town, so we were supposed to replace them. Or something.

JW: Well, there was that, and also that the venue the promoter was working through had a major image problem on campus. It was a vegan punk co-op, but it was in the basement of a church. It did feel vaguely suspicious, like they were promising you a Les Savy Fav show and instead you’d go down there and it’d be some weird cult baptism thing.

M: It’s a trap!

JW: Sometimes it’ll comes up in conversation, someone will say to us, “Do any of these events really need posters?” Well, this venue really needed them. So we did them. And that’s how we cut our teeth designing posters.

You Have Been At It Now As A Husband And Wife Team For A Few Years - How Does A Typical Day Go At Lfop Headquarters?
JW: If by a few you mean eight! We’re rapidly approaching our first decade of doing art together. Correction appended!

M: We get up late, we take some calls. We eat breakfast together. Then we work, pretty much straight into evening. Dinner time, then we go into the studio and print (or we don’t). Then TV time, then sleeps.

JW: 3:00am: Take the baby elephant for a walk, 3:15am: Jet-pack maintenance, 3:17am: Replenish boiling oil in castle moat. 4:00am- 2:59am[next day]: Suspended animation.

How Have You Found That You Take On Various Tasks Based On Your Strengths And Weaknesses?
JW: Yeah, I almost never talk on the phone.

M: I think when we started out we were preoccupied with splitting all tasks 50/50, but that’s just silly.

Do You Ever Just Plain Get Sick Of Each Other?
M: No.

JW: It’s us against the world!

M: Doing what you want to be doing with the person you like the best is pretty much all it’s cracked up to be.

I Never Tire Of This. I Still Can’t Believe Your Illustrations Are Not Drawn By Hand On Paper And Assembled - Tell The Kids At Home How You Design (James Specifically) And Why?
JW: I had kind of a catastrophic injury to my right hand, my drawing hand, when I was in art school. I couldn’t hold a pencil, and even after I could, I didn’t have the kind of finger control you need to be able to draw. It was a very strange situation. I didn’t know whether to quit school, or to just walk into the sea, or both. Eventually, I had to come up with another way of drawing, which turned out to be using the computer, plopping my dead hand onto the mouse and moving my whole arm.

M: As bad as all of that was, it ended up transforming our whole approach. Our drawing style completely changed. And that’s when we started doing silkscreen, too.

JW: In a way, it’s what pushed us towards design. When you’re an artist, you’re almost in love with your skill, with what you’re able to do. When that went away, I had to become so much more efficient and methodical. I had to think first and draw later. Which is more like what a designer is.

You Started Out Doing Tons Of Gigposters But Have Since Migrated Your Work Into Other Areas. This Coincides With Like-Minded Folks Such As Jesse Ledoux And Seripop Making Similar Moves - Why Do You Think You Have All Started Making More “Art” Per Se?
JW: We’ve always been making art prints—Maybe they’re just becoming good now.

M: We were still essentially kids when we started designing concert posters. I don’t think we’d really begun to think about how you turn something like this into a career. As our little thing grew we diversified, partly because people were giving us new opportunities that interested us, and partly out of necessity because the landscape of the concert poster thing changed so dramatically.

JW: These days, concert poster art has become a little pie sliced a thousand ways.

M: A tiny little pie. A personal pan pizza from the airport.

JW: I don’t think it’s possible anymore to make a living just by designing concert posters. But there’s a strong demand for our prints, so we’ve got an ongoing art print series, BAD VIBES, that people like.

M: The BAD VIBES prints have become really important to our process, too. They allow us to work through things and introduce new visual motifs that clients can point to and say “I want that.” Whereas if we were trying to convince a client to let us try something completely new, that wouldn’t go over so well.

JW: No kidding.

The Design Community Can Have A Shallow Opinion Of Gigposters Based On Lack Of Client Interaction Etc… What Say You LFoP?
JW: They’re 100% right.

M: They’re not right.

JW: I’ll say this, then: They’re not wrong. If the knock on concert posters is that you could slap any rubbish image onto a sheet of paper along with the most cursory of information, set in the ugliest typeface, and still consider yourself successful in your task— Not just consider yourself successful, but also being regarded that way by others—That’s about accurate. So they’re a little right. It depends on what poster you’re looking at. The degree to which I find concert posters to be successful is the degree to which the designer takes their task seriously. I’ve known “serious” designers who’ve done a concert poster and used it as an opportunity to use some illustration they’ve been kicking around for years, set off by a tangle of Avant Garde in the upper left. That kind of half-hearted stuff shows such a lack of regard– for the musicians, for everyone. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Posters stink > Therefore I don’t have to exert myself while designing one > Oops, I made a stinky poster > Posters stink.

M: The “If I Ever Get to Make a Poster” poster. The time-release stinkbomb.

JW: I still think it’s funny that designers-at-large would point to one kind of designer as being especially self-indulgent. You’re all just jealous!

M: Hatas! Hatas beware. They’re jealous because we get to indulge ourselves all of the time, and they can only get away with it about 95% of the time.

You Also Do A Lot Of Educating About Printmaking Including Demonstrations. What Draws You To That?
JW: We get asked, and then we forget to say no. By the time we’re asked to do a new education thing, we’ve forgotten about the heartache of the last one.

M: I think we’re good educators. We know what we’re talking about, and we do a pretty good job of communicating our ideas and guiding people toward a solution. But in other respects we’re crummy educators, because we take it personally when students don’t take our advice—

JW: Our very good advice.

M: –And I get upset when I know my students aren’t working hard. I hate watching people make the same mistake over and over again. It’s agony.

JW: We’ve become the kind of teachers that drove us crazy when we were students. So I guess we can’t really say why we do so much educating, since it pretty much drives us crazy.

M: We ran a community design lab for two years, we do a fair amount of lectures and artists’ residencies and we’ve just finished an illustration seminar. Craziness aside, all of those experiences have been really rewarding and we’ve met a lot of talented people.

JW: I think you could divide our education projects into two categories: Twisting the arms of art students, trying to make them think like designers; and twisting the arms of designers, trying to make them embrace silkscreen.

M: And giving Illustrators a purple nurple.

How Cool Was It To Be A Part Of Guitar Hero? How Did That Come About?
M: It was awesome. They just contacted us; they knew our work. They talked to us about the game and we thought, “This sounds really cool, but there’s no way that this will catch on.” They were nice, cool guys with a great idea.

JW: We had no way of knowing what a success it would be. It was a very pleasant surprise. Melissa’s teenage brother was totally in awe of her. I don’t think he really believed we could draw pictures for a living until they showed up in a video game.

What’s Inspiring Your Band Of Misfits That Seems To Be Inhabiting Your Artprints?
JW: I don’t think I understand your question. Maybe you’ve never been to Milwaukee. We just look out our front window.

M: And see a little dog riding a snake.

JW: It’s as easy as that.

You Are Masters Of Over And Under Printing - What Inspired This Direction In Your Work?
M: The medium inspired us to do it. Underprinting effects are just one of those things that are unique to silkscreen. We want our screenprints to look like screenprints—We want them to exude screenprint-ness. They should be shiny, they should have cool hidden details, texture shifts, and color-on-color interaction.

JW: We kind of consider a poster to be an object, instead of an image. I guess that probably runs counter to how other designers approach things. It’s probably because we usually take that extra step of printing our design, of making it into a thing. So those kind of object-oriented considerations become part of our design process.

Favorite LFoP Print?
JW: We just printed one called “Mister God.” That looks pretty good.

M: The one with no printing mistakes? The next one?

Favorite Silkscreen Print By Another Designer?
M: These are some of the prints that hang up in our house: Rob Jones’ “Bauhaus” Dirtbombs poster, a Marc Bell letterpress, Tyler Stout’s Alamo Drafthouse poster, a big Geoff Mcfetridge print, a Steven Harrington poster.

JW: I don’t know if any of those are my favorite, but I couldn’t even venture a guess, so just pick one of those.

What Can We Expect From Little Friends In The Near Future?
M: We have solo exhibitions this fall in Chicago at Threadless, in Mexico City at Kong, and here in Milwaukee too. We’re working on some ad stuff and some Europe stuff, secret stuff.

JW: BAD VIBES series 3 prints come out this summer! A lot of the designs are done already—they look good.

Take a peek at the additional goodness and pick up some killer prints: www.thelittlefriendsofprintmaking.com

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