The Ladykillers

The Little Friends of Printmaking are a husband-and-wife team of silkscreen artists living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Emerging onto an already crowded poster art scene in early 2003, The Little Friends quickly established themselves as an indispensable new talent. They are best known for the interplay of layers in their prints, and a playful looseness that leads the viewer to consider the process by which the image was created. This notion is central to their work-- as commercial screenprinting becomes practically obsolete, the Little Friends do their part to demystify the process and re-affirm the qualities that make screenprints desirable and unique among works on paper. The Little Friends were recently profiled in the new book New Masters of Poster Design (Rockport); their work can also be seen in Beasts! (Fantagraphics), The Darkening Garden (Payseur & Schmidt), and Two Faced: The Changing Face of Portraiture (IdN). They are currently working with Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin to develop a new Print & Publishing lab.Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. Screen printing is also a stencil method of print making in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with an impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface. It is also known as silkscreen, seriography, and serigraph.