Revamp!/New work.

If you've taken a look at the main page recently, you'll notice that things look a bit different. My childhood friend, Rachel, generously lent me her beautiful Canon T2I for the weekend while she's here visiting, so I could take ACTUAL photos of my work that weren't just lousy point-and-shoots or Instagram captures. All of these photos are brand new, focused, and accurately representative. It's so exciting to see the difference in my work, and the unity that happens when everything has been white balanced correctly (thanks to my Matt for showing me how to do this)! I'm hoping to use these images to make high-quality giclee prints to sell on Etsy and through my website eventually.

I also will take this chance to post and discuss some previously unpublished work.


This was honestly inspired by the painful aftermath of a stupid relationship. The great thing about typography is the ability to anonymize it. Even if something you write or create relates to you on a ridiculously personal level, no one has to know. There's no girl in the drawing that looks like your ex, and there's no telling imagery about a situation. There are only words here. I'm a sucker for old movies, and one of my friends gave me the idea to portray this message on a marquee-type background. I decided to play with that thought, and while this doesn't function perfectly, it was a fun exercise.


This is a personal piece I made for my dad as a Father's Day present. Before I learned to read, he used to read this book to me as a bedtime story. It was just your average, cute children's book, but I absolutely loved it and would have him read it to me almost every night. Eventually, I learned to read through having him repeat it over and over again, which was such a big event. It's one of my favorite memories of the two of us, so illustrating imagery from that story just seemed to fit. The lettering, jar, and snowflakes are all cut out with an X-acto knife, which was painstaking but definitely worth it. I want to use this technique in more of my future work.

 

This was a quick sketch for the Sketch Tuesday event at 111 Minna last week. It was my first time participating as an artist, and it was a good exercise of, well, sketching, but also time management (or lack thereof). I only got two sketches done, one of which was definitely not done--but that wasn't really my focus. I started a new full-time job about a month ago, and since then I've been trying to maintain a healthy balance between work work and art work. I'm not gonna lie, it's difficult. Especially when I'm also trying to create melodies for the songs on my band's first EP, which will hopefully come out by the end of summer...but that's another story (for another blog?). Anyway, I was basically just there to draw for myself. I didn't sell either of the sketches, but I got some sweet compliments and encouragement. I'd definitely do it again.

This is the continuation of the piece I discussed here. It's called Taut. I am still debating whether I want the cords to wrap around the house or not. There's something really intense in the idea of that, but I can't bring myself to mess up the linework I have. We shall see.

Eternal Sunshine/Beach House.

This is an Instagram shot of my newest drawing (still in progress).

 
Not to be cliche, but living in San Francisco for almost four years has opened me up to a lot of eccentric styles of architecture. As beautifully vibrant as some of the Victorians here can be, I've been more fascinated by the panels and lines that make up their form. The first project that involved this idea of "ghost homes" dates back to fall 2010, during my last semester of school. You can find it here.

I recently watched (for the fifteenth or twentieth time) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of my all-time favorite films. One very vivid motif in the movie involves the continual breaking down and morphing of Joel and Clem's surrounding environment. Joel twists and turns in and out of memories that associate him with places from their shared past, and eventually, he learns to rely on emotional cues and sounds instead of what's tangible.

There's a final scene where Joel and Clem return to the place where they first met--a beach house somewhere on the coast of Montauk. After they lose all memory of each other, this is the town in which they unknowingly reunite. The disintegration of that house inspired an idea in which a fleeting thought was anchored down--which I tried to represent here.

I bounced this idea off of my dad to get his thoughts on it. He thinks it's missing something, like color. But I think I'm interested in what makes it incomplete, rather than just making it work conventionally.

Will post when it's done.

stay.

New drawing for Holidayland 2011. The text bubble will read "Stay." These ghost houses are really painstaking because I'm using a ruler's edge on almost every single line in the picture, but the parts of it I love the most are probably the crooked mistakes. Hoping to have this done and in my shop by next week.

Holidayland is a super awesome pop-up shop in Oakland run by Alissa Goss and Kerri Johnson (owner of Blankspace Gallery) that will be hosting a bunch of vendors and their art/crafts/bath stuff/what-have-you from November 25th (Black Friday) until Christmas Eve (December 24th). I'm really excited for this opportunity and am hoping it'll bring me a lot of new artist friends, connections, and hopefully a few fans and interested buyers (crossing my fingers!!). You can keep track of all things Holidayland here. And here, too.