granny gear

an illustration for bicycle times magazine about using your granny gear on steep hills. it’s out now — i saw one at our local whole foods in the checkout line. it’s always a thrill to see work i’ve done out in the wild!

a preliminary sketch of the grocery-laden wife:

it’s hard matchmaking for drawings, so i asked around on the internet: who was her husband? the consensus was: beardy. and that’s how mr. shaggy suspendersman up there came to be.

bike basket pies for bicycle times

For Bicycle Times issue #11 (out on June 1st), I made a painting of Bike Basket Pies’ baker and biker, Natalie. (Some friends pointed out that I have a nifty start to a food delivery bike oeuvre, what with having illustrated the Soup Peddler a few years ago as well.) I was just gonna draw Natalie and her bike, but I know she delivers in the Mission district and thought it would be fun to make up a little storefront. I love papel picado, so I made up some bicycle ones, and a San Francisco bike rack really needs a guerilla knit cozy (knitta please!!).

here’s where I started:

You’ll notice I got a hold of one of her pies, a yummy but important step in my research.

here’s step two, with a photoshopped actual storefront temporarily standing in:

historical fruit corsets

^^click for biggerer!

new painting!! this was so much fun to research. the antique corset gallery and bridges on the body were especially helpful. while i was working on it, i liked imagining who would be wearing these undergarments. elizabeth bennett reading impassioned letters from mr. darcy in her blueberry underpinnings… laura ingalls walking on the prairie in her apple corset… mary poppins in that sassy s-curve banana… ladies on the titanic sinking in that skinny boob-to-hip constriction… me own nan in a postwar pear girdle.

i painted this for jessica ayre, who made me the strawberry corset which was the original inspiration!

bicycles

Ink and watercolor bicycle tea paintings! For sale tonight at the Mission Bicycle Company during the Mission Holiday Block Party. They’re gonna be $50 each unframed. Check out the Pashley Mailstar, English postmen use it to deliver the mail!

new prints available

thumbtackpress.com has updated their website and also added a bunch of my tea paintings (in addition to my alice in wonderland pair) for sale as prints!

^^click image to go to my thumbtack page!

thumbtack press makes giclee prints on heavy white stock. i’ve always been really happy with the quality of their work. their shipping is also fabulous, no crinkled paper rolled up in mashed tubes!

wee penelly

for penelope’s 2nd birthday. i started it when she was six months old! she used to have far less hair with far more lift.

la chuparrosa

in english:
Hummingbird, the Rose Sucker.
She is hungry.
She is thirsty.

inspired by my friend esther, who, like a hummingbird, must eat and drink constantly or become woozy and fierce. it turns out these two qualities are not mutually exclusive!

the sketch:

malaysia

^^click for notes!

a tiny little painting about malaysia. it includes stuff i thought about as a kid: 1. the copious amounts of milo ( a chocolate-tasting drink sort of like ovaltine) my aunties made me, 2. the plants which snapped shut that i played with all day, 3. why do malaysian cats have no tails?, 4. ketupat, little woven packages of steamed rice my nenek used to make, 5. mom’s curry puffs (delish!), 6. mangosteens, my favorite fruit, and the rambutans from nenek’s tree, 7. cicak, the little house geckos that scrobbled along the ceilings and ate bugs. everything else i thought about later, like the carnivorous plants, giant moths, fishhead curry, and whole families weaving in traffic on their motorbikes.

the layout is based on this carson ellis poster i just love to bits kind of inexplicably. carson ellis is amazing, by the way.

winter approacheth

these birdies are letting each other know that it’s time to get outta dodge. i loved painting that ribbon! it’s not actually red, it’s brown madder. i’ll holiday cardify them in the next week or so — 4×9″ flat cards with envelopes! neat, eh??

depression sisters homesteading

tea-ed and colored! based on the whinery family of pietown, new mexico.

none of my grandpeoples lived in america ever. they were kicking cans in various other locales during the great depression. if you wanna tell me a grandparent depression story, please do!