giant moth invasion
new painting! it’s the house where my mom grew up (with large uninvited insect guest). one day i was looking at pictures of atlas moths and my mother, peering over my shoulder, mentioned she hated them. i prodded a bit to find out the reason for the strong reaction. apparently, her village was overrun with them!
One year we had these atlas moths invading our village. They were fluttering all around the house to try and get in! They left torn and battered wings all over the yard!
i always pictured the invasion looking like this. i’m gonna give it a stir in my brainpan and see if i can’t get a book to pop out.
Filed under illustration, tea painting | Tags: malaysia, moths, tea painting | Comment (0)emperor norton
letterpress project #4, Emperor Norton I, bay bridge visionary and a damn great san franciscan, with apocryphal canine companions bummer and lazarus.
>>a bit more about norton in an earlier post of mine<<
i printed norton on crane’s lettra paper. the texture is amazing!
Filed under illustration, letterpress, oddities, san francisco | Comment (0)falling
letterpress project #3, a wood type poster in two colors. the text is from an uncommonly charming article in the sf chronicle i saved a few years ago on the perseids. meteor-watching tip #5: take someone with whom you like to sit in the dark.
i found a pair of little lead owls in one of the type drawers to punctuate my sentence:
one for sorrow
second letterpress workshop project — an old, creepy nursery rhyme on using crows for divination (with special guest star, the devil). i looked and looked for a bad little black bird to set with the rest of the type. there were hella owls, cute sparrows, some turkeys, a crane, and even a pair of seagulls wearing eyepatches and striped sweaters (?!!). i ended up having to paint one on each print instead.
behold, the magic of letterpress:
i’m bad. like jesse james.
i’m taking a letterpress workshop at the san francisco center for the book. the first project — a john lee hooker quote. it went really well! and it gave me happy art school memories. next week we are setting a broadside with 5-10 lines of poetry. if i continue with the BAD theme, i may do keats: “give me women, wine, and snuff / until i cry out, ‘hold, enough!’”
circus bugs welcome
circus bugs to welcome a handsome wee gentleman.
80s toy explosion
hello 80s childhood! hello dollies-that-go-with-a-cartoon zeitgeist, censorious and brusque speak-and-spell, snoopy ascii art on dot matrix paper, magic elfin plastic woodland toys, mary lou retton leotard, and film canisters that no modern child will recognize. click through for labels!
i may turn this into a painting or use it to practice my wacom skillz.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)neil armstrong walking on my face
happy halloween! i was the moon.
all i had to do was construct a lunar lander out of felt. simple!
hmmm… maybe not so simple. the explosion on the table in my studio tells the real tale.
it comes together fairly quickly once you figure out the bottom half is an octagon and if you can emotionally accept just gluing together a mishmash of three dimensional shapes for the top half instead of following the real diagram.
bedtime stories
an illustration for a baby book shower. the fox is reading goodnight moon and the raccoon is reading frog & toad (the frog and toad series is a really great read, by the way, if you haven’t opened it up since childhood. they deal with some complex human issues–willpower, existential angst, etc.–with humor and empathy and mostly using two syllable words.)
the raccoon was also turned into some pretty sweet bookmarks:
