South By Southwest (SXSW), the business + music festival that seemed an awful lot like a giant comic convention to me, was stuffed full of an almost incomprehensible amount of many things to see and do. It isn’t conceivable that anyone could do everything there – even if they figured out a way to forgo sleep.

Flatstock was one of those events-within-an-event that I’m really happy I got a chance to experience.

Here’s the official description:

Flatstock is an art exhibition of the world’s most influential and exception gig poster artists, featuring handmade, limited-edition poster from artists around the globe. The show features an incredible range of visual styles, techniques and colors for sale by the talented artists who created them.

This event was held in one portion of the SXSW main exhibition floor for just three days March 15th, 16th and 17th. There were about fifty artists exhibiting brilliant work. And most of these artists (but not all) print their own posters. They took a lot of pride in that.

It was kind of like a farm-to-table version of the Illustrators Society, if that venerable club listened to a LOT of bands and created poster for their favorites.

I had a great conversation with Lil Tuffy, one of the “elders” of the group. His work was creative and bold but he spoke with the comfortable ease of a longtime musician. Clearly, his enthusiasm and the spark of creativity was there – along with a sense of pride about what Flatstock has become. Check out his talent here.

If “a picture tells a thousand words”, this column is about to become longer than a Tolkien novel. Let me let these incredible artists do the heavy lifting for the rest of this With Further Ado column. Browse through the slideshow below.

And hey, if you need more, or links to the artists, you can find it all here..