hazel

Introducing Hazel, a hobbitish semibold italic serif font that I hand drew with a hawk quill nib. For sale on my etsy page for personal use (email me to set up a commercial license). Enjoy! Send me a jpeg if you make anything lovely with it.

Special features: There are some fancy Zs in place of straight brackets (which come in very handy for a Liza living with one Mr. Hazel, but probably not for anyone else), a ribbony banner, a hazel leaf and a fern frond, a full moon and a star, a swooshy definite article and two prepositions. I think it looks especially lovely in all caps, and Goreyesque in the lowercase.

Hazel is a dab hand at the unattributed creepy old poem:

In its original, pre-digitized form:

batik experiment

Experiments in making watercolor-on-paper fake batik with the help of liquid masking fluid.

find the river

all the plants in Find the River by REM (at the end of Automatic for the People). i listen to it and Nightswimming a lot at this time of year for that mushy, end-of-summer melancholia feeling. “september is coming soon / pining for the moon”

here’s one with a title, i couldn’t decide which i liked better:

sisters making milo

milo is like a more earnest ovaltine. malaysian aunties make it for you when they want you to be distracted from what they are gossipping to your mother about.

besides the milo, some other very malay things in the painting are the bobtailed cat and the house geckos, or cicak. my grandmother’s house was full of them!

note the moths approaching (ominously?) outside the window. this is the second painting in a series i’m working on about a giant moth invasion. i haven’t written a story, i am messing around with painting things i like, adding words later, and hoping something interesting comes of it all.

funky

i discovered a delightful fact about my partner-in-crime this week.
me: one of your first tapes was purple rain by prince…?
steve: yeah, i chose it for the beautiful cover art.
me: …with darling nikki on side A??
steve: it sounded awesome on my fisher price tape player!

my 90s frocks

i attended high school with great sartorial exuberance. i’ve been working on this here and there for the past few months when i got stuck on other things (fantastic wacom tablet practice! i’m not afraid of it anymore). now what will i do to procrastinate?

work + play

hooray, i’m in! my illustration got picked for the upcoming ICON illustration conference Work + Play group show. it’ll be up at land gallery in portland from july 11th-august 17th. land is selling prints of all the participating illustrations. my print is here.

the painting was inspired by a recent tandem outing with steve, during which we had a terrible argument (naturally). surprisingly pleasant work getting lost in the swirlies of hairy orangutan.

drawing at yosemite

mother’s day

today i present all the dresses my mother sewed for me in high school. thanks mama!

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.