Department Store Product Screen Print Shop

Micky Cranston

posted by Robyn Pitts June 30, 2020

Micky Cranston is a designer and printmaker working across screen and relief print. His work is a mixture of illustration and collage created from found images, type, vintage illustrations, comic book art, advertising, and photographs.

He is relatively new to the world of printmaking, having dabbled here and there over the years making the odd band t-shirt or print. However, he became fully immersed at the beginning of last year when he joined the shared workshop space of The Printhaus in Cardiff. “It’s very much a family-spirited place with people of all ages and backgrounds criss-crossing through, chatting and sharing ideas, techniques, where’s cheapest to buy ink, making tea or going for a beer” describes the artist. Being surrounded by other print-dabblers and full-time printmakers in this environment has inspired him to dig deeper and get more involved in the inky print world.

“I was first attracted to silkscreen art through a book on graphic design for music. There was a section on American gig posters with work by people like Aesthetic Apparatus, The Small Stakes, Art Chantry and the like. These inventive, bold, colourful, graphic, handmade wonders immediately caught my attention and I fell in love.”

Micky is particularly drawn to the aesthetic of halftone printing; “that machined dot pattern of old-school printmaking, preferably at the more lo-fi end of the scale… off-register, patchy, grungy textures… human traces of imperfection“. It is this style that Micky aims to retain in his work, keeping it rough round the edges. Embracing imperfection also saves him time in the print room, and he tends to be impatient; “I hate to labour over work and will lose interest or focus if I spend too long on anything“.

Growing up reading comic books, and obsessed with the Beano, Micky has always wanted to be a comic cartoonist. He later progressed onto Garfield, and dreamed of being a three-panel newspaper cartoonist. Micky then moved into the more grown-up sci-fi world of 2000AD; Judge Dredd being a big favourite. “What I loved about that world, besides the action, was the satirical vein of apocalyptic consumerism that ran through it – the gruesome superficiality of a mutated culture” explains the printmaker. Traces of this are clearly evident in his works that are available on Department Store. These pieces are mainly collage-based, and take elements of old-fashioned advertisements and put them through a slightly twisted modern filter. He subverts cute and kitsch imagery, flipping them over to reveal a weird underbelly.

“I’m a big fan of collage and I love fluorescent inks for their slap-in-the-face impact and totally unnatural nature. Those types of colour seem to fit with this hyper consumer vibe. It’s like industrial warning signs – they use explosive colours for a reason – to make you immediately take notice and pay attention.”

Micky’s work makes subtle comment on the facade of aspirational culture; “this age of apocalyptic consumerism we seem to be living in, tied to the good old days and fearful of the future“. He hopes to more deeply explore these ideas, perhaps making them more overt in his work, though sometimes he feels it’s just about “creating something weird or funny“.

Besides screen printing, Micky also dabbles in linocut, and has recently been experimenting with rubber-stamping and woodcut. Ultimately, he hopes to combine all these disciplines in his work, and incorporate a variety of print techniques. He concludes; “hopefully this is where the future lies for me… getting more involved, better work… and keeping it rough round the edges”.