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:

san francisco drorings

some drorings from around town.

arnold lobel show

really liked the arnold lobel show at the contemporary jewish museum! he made everything 1:1 so they were mostly pretty tiny, like stuff i used to do for kids’ magazines. they had some of his color separations up too, totally fascinating and upsetting at the same time. i read trina schart hyman said color separations made her wild with rage and nearly blind. i’m so glad i never had to learn how to do that. a couple sweet things about the show was what it sounded like. people going around would read the text or see toad in a saggy 20s swimming costume and have a laugh. also, the show next door had a grand piano set up and somebody was practicing a waltz. so it was all soft chuckling and short echoey bursts of dreamy piano. the last nice thing was they had a table set up with blank postcards so you could write to a friend. i think i’ll send mine to my little pal bridget, we read a lot of frog & toad together! (i drew the background while studying the cover of mouse soup)

circus bugs welcome

circus bugs to welcome a handsome wee gentleman.

80s toy explosion in color

click through for labels.

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.

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:

london & paris drorings

i recently returned from a delightful trip to london and paris. i brought a moleskine sketchbook and a pentel brush pen with me:

tumblewords posters

my mushroom forest and painted desert backgrounds for tumblewords are now available as posters in the minicore studios shop!

tumblewords

hooray, tumblewords is available in the itunes store! this means i’m a video game illustrator!

tumblewords is a word game for apple-type devices from minicore studios in austin. i illustrated two of the themes, “mushroom forest” and “painted desert.” it’s actually pretty addictive, i spent several hours on it last weekend and managed, with considerable joy, to wrest 150 points out of it by finding “philistine.”

so, do step into my world and find some juicy words. i painted all that woodgrain for you!!

click here to download tumblewords at the itunes store

all of my tumblewords bits and pieces:

malaysian moon moth

my favorite kind of moon moth. coincidentally from the same neck of the woods as me!

twiggy, buggy wedding invitations

i submitted a couple designs for judgement to the minted wedding design challenge:

TWIGS

a stark, twiggy invitation perfect for an outdoor wedding in a wooded setting, featuring hand-lettered initials and a pair of flirty birds. there’s a john lennon quote at the very bottom from “grow old with me,” a song that makes me straight up bawl.

the rest of the alphabet

…and an rsvp and accommodations card.

DAMASK MEADOW

a springtime meadow-themed storybook wedding invitation featuring your favorite creepy crawly outdoor denizens in a Victorian damask pattern. heh, everything my young man hates about hanging out in nature!

PS:

minted.com

family food: malaysia

mama’s curry is the best curry. recipes here!

dr. sketchy’s toulouse lautrec night

oh la la! la belle france! a model in her drawers! another fabuleux evening at dr. sketchy’s anti-art school.

paletero

it’s sunny in san francisco today so the paleteros will probably be out in full force in the mission:

their popsicles are usually the severed heads of licensed characters so i made up a few of my own, but i guess they came out looking kinda gentrified:

the google image search on “paletas” always cheers me up.