Little Friends of Printmaking
Melissa and James Buchanan are the husband-and-wife team behind Little Friends of Printmaking. Based out of Los Angeles, CA, the Buchanans design and silkscreen posters with an infectiously fun, graphic style. Multiple layers of dense color and texture add a revelatory aspect to their work – you discover more details the longer you look, allowing you to see process as well as finished piece. While most artists create in isolation, the duo executes every piece together, a process that is more seamless than it sounds (it helps that Melissa and James had similar styles to begin with).
The Buchanans have exhibited in galleries around the world and have been featured in the books New Masters of Poster Design and Handmade Nation as well as magazines such as WIRED and BusinessWeek.
Reinvigorating the old art of screenprinting, the duo aims to “spread the gospel of silkscreen to anyone inclined to listen.”
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Zeus Beard: When did you first know you wanted to become an artist?
James: I don’t actually know! I know I went to an art museum as a small child and was blown away by Ellsworth Kelly, but I don’t know if I was considering future career opportunities at the time. I was probably just enjoying myself.
Melissa: When I was a kid, I treated art as a nice pastime but thought I’d go into something math- or science-related. When I came home for the summer after my first year in college, I ran into my high school art teacher and she was shocked that I wasn’t pursing art, though she’d never really given me any indication that I should consider art as a career. I was basically like “well shit, why didn’t anyone tell me this was a thing I could do?”
ZB: How did you come up with the name “Little Friends of Printmaking”?
M: We started Little Friends in college as an art collective and thought it was funny to sound like a fake arts organization, then later when it was just the two of us we thought it was funny that the name made us sound like a fake business. It was all a big joke to us – an art goof – that we had a logo and business cards and a professional-seeming website. Eventually our joke business became a real business and now it’s my actual professional job to draw silly pictures and make jokes.
ZB: How did you two meet, and did you ever expect to be working together like this?
J: We met in college in 2D Design, the most basic and boring of all foundation courses. The professor was already familiar with my work and told Melissa that our work was very similar.
M: Of course we both immediately took offense.
J: When someone does that, you have the choice of either becoming mortal enemies or collaborators. We chose to be collaborators (in part because it was the option that allowed us to each do 50% less schoolwork). Printmaking requires a buddy – it’s really a two-person operation. It’s a discipline that engenders collaboration by necessity. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined that we were starting something that would last so long. I’ve been making artwork with Melissa for longer than I made artwork without Melissa. Our entire artistic output is defined by our collaboration.
ZB: What inspired the two of you to get into art?
M: We were both skeptical about our ability to be working artists after college, but honestly, we didn’t have many other prospects so we just kept going.
ZB: Do you ever argue over the direction a piece of art should take?
J: Sure! It happens very infrequently now, but when we were younger there was a lot of pressure to make sure you were able to express yourself in every piece and make it 50/50, a pure democracy. When you’re a young artist you feel that every big opportunity is going to be your last one, so the need to get your way becomes extremely important.
M: Over the course of the years we’ve developed a house style that’s our own. It mitigates the need to fight over details because we’re operating with a toolbox that we’ve created together.
ZB: Take us through the creation process of a new print.
J: First, we have to have enough downtime between for-hire projects to devote to a new print, or there has to be an in-person event coming up that strikes fear into our hearts and compels us to make new prints to sell. The next step is talking things through together and figuring out what we want to accomplish with the print. We don’t really sketch to come up with ideas – we like to develop concepts by talking.
M: We don’t work side-by-side – we like to either take turns or call the other person in to talk about the design’s progress at the beginning and end of the day. No one likes a back seat driver.
J: As we work, we design everything in layers with an eye towards how the pieces will come together as a screenprint. And then there’s the actual printing!
M: We have a live-work studio and we print everything at home by hand. As physical activities go, screenprinting is less rigorous than running a marathon but more rigorous than pick-up basketball. It’s hard work and when it’s not going well it’s straight up awful. When it’s going well, you wonder why you don’t do it every day.
ZB: Your prints are very colorful and fun. Who/what do you draw inspiration from?
J: We draw our inspiration from the outdoors, especially here in California – hiking in Eaton Canyon, visiting Huntington Gardens, bumming around Joshua Tree. We get inspiration from our pets – they’re silly as hell and they cause us to always be making animal-themed work.
M: Our aesthetic is directly inspired by the silkscreen process. We like big flats of bright color; we love layering ink and hiding details in underprinting. We want our prints to feel like they could only exist as a screenprint, and to not feel like a reproduction of a drawing.
ZB: Your art has been displayed around the world! How does that make you feel?
J: It makes me feel all the feelings. Pride, self-hatred, fear of failure, surprise – all the main feelings.
M: I also experience human feelings.
ZB: We heard you relocated to Los Angeles from the Midwest a few years ago. What inspired this change in locale, and has it affected your careers as artists?
J: It was a purely lifestyle-based decision. I feel weird even saying that because I know most people don’t do that – they wait until there’s a good reason to move, like a job or school. Frankly, we got tired of waiting.
M: We have a job but it’s not tied to a place, so three years ago we just packed everything up and split. The biggest difference is that in Los Angeles we get to be a part of a huge community of artists who are broadly supportive of what we do.
J: In Milwaukee, everyone warned us that we’d just be a small fish in a big pond if we moved away. They were right but working in Los Angeles is wonderful – you don’t have that sense of life-or-death competition with the artists around you. There are opportunities for everyone so people can relax and be friends.
ZB: Do you ever think about working on projects alone, on the side?
M: I don’t know what the point would be. If I were to ever feel unfulfilled by our current work, we’d just talk about it and figure out a different kind of work to make together. Also, we just don’t have time for a side piece.
ZB: Do you have a favorite piece?
M: It’s hard for me to enjoy our work without becoming preoccupied with how I’d like to improve it.
J: I like most of them but I rarely have time to reflect on our work – as soon as we’re finished with a project we’re on to the next one. Sometimes when we’re setting up a display at an event, I get surprised, like, “Hey! These are pretty good.”
ZB: What’s a typical day like for you?
J: We wake up, we answer emails in bed (sorry clients for that mental picture), we walk the dog, we eat a salad, we work for as many hours as we can stand, then we eat dinner. If we’re feeling super motivated or we’re under the gun we go back to work; otherwise, we hang out with friends.
ZB: What can we expect from Little Friends of Printmaking in the near future?
M: We have a bunch of enamel pins and new shirt designs coming out this summer, plus a whole bunch of new prints for summer fairs like San Diego Comic Con and CatConLA. We’re prepping for a solo show in October at Land Gallery in Portland, OR. I’m also making some curtains for our windows because this summer it’s already hot as hell here in Pasadena.
