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 group show

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.

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!

instruments

all the instruments in our (one bedroom) apartment as of yesterday:

note: in the last couple years, we have given away/sold/fostered out 1) another acoustic guitar, 2) a heavy metal electric purple axe, 3) a bass guitar, 4) a keyboard, 5) a set of enormous outdoor-type speakers. we use 2 amps for nightstands. there are three. it’s like the polyphonic spree up in here. this is clearly a cry for help. steve needs to start a band, stat.

STARS

i love wood type! so much character. all the swirling galaxies and nebulae in each letter.

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!'”

formative music

Music I loved in high school that helped me grow up into a person! Wildly beloved tapes: the Violent Femmes, a Smiths tape with The Queen is Dead and Meat is Murder that my oldest friend made me, They Might Be Giants. CDs: Tori Amos, Under the Pink; REM, Automatic for the People; Bjork, Debut; Ani Difranco, Out of Range; Mazzy Star, Among My Swan; the Cure, Disintegration; Jethro Tull, Aqualung; and Sting, the Soul Cages. I also listened to lots of Beatles (Sgt. Pepper, the white album, and the Magical Mystery Tour) and the Police (Ghost in the Machine, Synchronicity), but ran out of room.

formative books

Books I loved in my ancient long-ago teenagerhood: the Elfquest graphic novel series (this particular one is book three: Captives of Blue Mountain, by Wendy and Richard Pini); The Darkangel, Meredith Ann Pierce; The World According to Garp, John Irving; The Blue Sword, Robin McKinley; Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams; The Belgariad series, book three: Magician’s Gambit, David Eddings; Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard.

reading list

my favorite books from the last couple years. they are! moab is my washpot by stephen fry, burma chronicles by guy delisle, relish by lucy knisley, birds of a lesser paradise by megan mayhew bergman, wide-eyed by trinie dalton, farm city by novella carpenter, and magic for beginners by kelly link. (i might have to make another painting, there were a bunch of runners-up)

trouble musings

some watercolor practice on trouble coffee co from this photo of the owner: http://jeffsingerphotography.com/2014/1/7/giuliettacarrelli i painted giulietta’s skin tones using chai tea, which is what i usually order when i’m at trouble. tattoos are really fun to paint! do you have a whole gallimaufry of tattoos? will you send me a picture of yourself?

trouble itself viewed from its parklet: