Link Wray, Bimbos in San Francisco, 1997
Artwork and commentary by Alan Forbes

“This poster is actually a portrait of somebody I knew that worked at a tattoo shop, and he had a crush on this girl, so I put them both in the poster. I’d always wanted to do Link Wray. This was my one and only opportunity—it was one of those deals. To me, part of the appeal of doing this poster was putting my buddy and this girl on there, and they actually got together for a while. All of the lettering’s hand-done, and I’ve used the same size brush for years. I never use a pen. This purple color was appearing quite a bit back then. I was worrying a lot about what the colors did, what happened when you put one color on top of another color, how it changes. In the background, there’s that purple and then the same flesh that I used for the face of the guy and the girl. I put it over the purple and it got the weird background thing on it. I was trying to get the most out of four or five colors. This one’s a real hard poster to get. I don’t even have one of these.”

See More Poster Art from Alan Forbes

Check out Alan’s Website