Lucha Libre Poster - Mérida, Mexico


A favorite memory from Mexico was the Lucha Libre match in Mérida.  
Unfortunately, the match happened while my SLR was kaput. The low-light of the arena and fast action of the wrestlers is one situation where a compact camera will fall-short. There was just not enough light getting through the tiny lens to the tiny sensor to get good still photographs. I managed to salvage a few photos by converting them to a grainy, high-contrast black & white, pretty crummy, but better than nothing!

Flash was out of the question. Even though I was practically ringside, a compact camera's flash doesn't reach very far! But the compact camera redeemed itself by forcing me to try the video feature that I'd never really bothered with. I've assembled the clips into the video below. Of course the quality of the video is just what you'd expect out of a compact camera, but it made for a fun souvenir. It was enough of a taste of the potential of shooting video to convince me that my next SLR will have a video function. Something as fast paced as Lucha Libre reallly suits video, as the tremendous toughness, acrobatic skill and humor of these guys doesn't come across in a still image.








The Poster
A motorcycle trip of anything longer than a weekend should leave you with a heap of photos to work with. Last month's post with the Baja slideshow wrote about having the time to retouch your photos, but there's a lot more that can be done with your travel images if you've got the inclination.

After the match, I'd taken down one of the posters for a souvenir, but it arrived home torn, folded, and covered in tape. I took some time last week at the screen-printing studio La Bourgeoise Serigraphe  to make a reproduction.

I took a high-res scan of the original poster, with Photoshop clipped-out some of the iron ornaments from my photo below and then arranged them on top of a background texture created from another photograph of an old wall near the wrestling arena in Mérida.



Here's a close-up of  one of the silk screens, with the red and green ink for the gradient.




This squegee blade is used to spread the ink, it's two feet long.


It was a hell of a lot of work to set-up and print by hand. Too much work to make just one poster, so I've made about twenty. Each colour is a seperate process and you gotta press hard and even for the ink to spread smoothly over such a large surface. These 20 posters represent about four or five hours work. Heaps of fun though and they turned-out great!


The metallic copper frame looks great!





I figured I'd put the extras up for sale, here are the details:
  • 24"x 36" 
  • 4-colour hand-made screenprint - Red, green, tan, copper-metallic
  • $30 plus shipping
  • + free surprise!
Send an email to anthony[at]motojournalism.com with your shipping address and I'll let you know the total and I'll send a Paypal/credit card link.



The free surprise is pretty cool too...




0 Response to "Lucha Libre Poster - Mérida, Mexico"

Post a Comment