My name is Jay Ryan. I draw silly animals and ridiculous situations. I try to relate
them to music groups and make concert posters for some of my favorite bands.
I've been doing this for 16 years now. I started working under Steve Walters, the screwball
press. I was doing some freelance illustration for a friend named Andy Mueller. Andy got
asked to design a poster for a Super Suckers rocket from the Crypt and Wesley Willis Fiasco.
We went and met up with Steve at screwball. Basically, Steve and I hit it off. I started
out over there sweeping and cleaning up screens and moved to helping print and printed Steve's
work, other people's work, and my own stuff eventually.
I worked with Steve for about three years before I opened my own shop called the Bird Machine
here in luxurious downtown Skokie, Illinois.
The company's called the Bird Machine because it was the last name left, actually. I tried
to call it the Catholic Church and then I found out that was taken already and then I tried
to get IBM, but that was also taken. So the Bird Machine seemed like the right choice
from the last couple names that were left. I think that there's an appreciation for this
type of work and the fact that the images are hand drawn, the same process could have
been done the same way 50 years ago. I think the finished product, there's sort of a tech
talk quality to it that an offset print doesn't have. There are a lot of good screen printers
and a lot of good poster makers working these days in a way that there weren't 15 years
ago, the fact that anybody wants to come here and have me do work for them at this point
is amazing to me. I really like the process that's associated with the way that we work.
I'll work on a drawing one night after dinner, come in in the morning, get films made of
the key plate, and then we can start printing before I've really finished designing the
poster. I'm able to cut that film, burn a screen, set up the press, and start printing.
And once we've got ink on the paper, I'm able to sort of decide what the next step is going
to be. There's no point where I'm designing, where I go, okay, it is done. Things change
during the process. The prints take left turns and sometimes they'll get rearranged, recomposed,
extreme, add colors, subtract colors. I enjoy that process because I actually don't know
what the print's going to look like when it's finished.
One of the most valuable things I learned in school was to turn off this little voice
in your head that says, oh, well, that's a dumb idea. Don't do that. Like, I'd start
in on a painting and I'd go, oh, this is dumb. And so I kind of got to this point where I
was frozen up and I couldn't paint. I couldn't produce a bunch of anything. And one of my
professors got me to focus on quantity over quality, draw a bunch of drawings, a whole
lot of work. And then only after you've got the whole body of work done, you go back and
try to evaluate it. That sort of approach, I think it's translated well to having bad
ideas and seeing them through to the point where they're interesting.
The addition size is influenced by what the print is that we're making. Most of our projects
we aim to have about 300 prints. A large, normal print run for us is 1,000. That kind
of project comes up once a year. The difficulties in doing a larger run like that have to do
it in just physical constraints of working in a shop this size.
All our papers are made from old paper by the French paper company, Hermato. French,
as American as it gets. They're nice people. It's a 130-year-old family-owned company.
They're the sixth generation of paper makers. It's 100% recycled stock, acid-free, made
using hydroelectric power. Feel good about using that paper. We're not de-floresting
or sketching one to make posters for melvins. Not directly. The melvins may want that, but
I'm not going to do it for them. I think that the next threat to this process would be if
one of our screen printing materials manufacturers, such as the company Yulano, if they were to
go out of business and stop making Ruby Lift, that would be the next threat in the same way
that I have friends who now can't get Polaroid film or now have a hard time getting 2-inch
audio tape for the recording studios. However, I don't see any threat to this process coming
from that direction anytime soon. Then we put the prints on the internet, sell them, and
make dozens of dollars.
