Five Leaf Clover Logo

Hey, world! It's been awhile. I've been remarkably happy and well adjusted and BUSY living here in Portland, which means I haven't been putting time and energy into making art. But don't worry, the crushing depression of winter in the Pacific Northwest is on the verge of hitting, so I'll no doubt be productive for the coming months of emotional hell.

 Last night, my dear friend Claire rolled into town to vend at Orycon. She sells ridiculously adorable geeky accessories and runs an etsy shop as Five Leaf Clover. She's been looking for a logo/character to represent all the badass things she sells, and asked me to come up with something that encompasses steampunk, Star Trek, Star Wars, circus, video games, furries, and general geekitude, plus a five leaf clover. While she was doing some last minute jewelry assembly for the con, I drew up, inked and colored the above. I think it looks pretty damn fitting, if I do say so myself.

These were my original sketches. The initial concept she gave me was "chibi", which is a little far out of my normal drawing style, as the creepy big-eyes creatures above can attest. Fortunately, she then gave me Chainsaw Girl as a style reference, which was MUCH easier for me to replicate.

Mapping out a pose for the figure and labeling all the elements we wanted to include. (I made a few lists to make sure we got them all!)

First rough of the figure- too big, and too sweet for the look I wanted. As you can see, I replaced the lists of elements with "ALL THE THINGS."

And the final piece! From the top down, we have fox style kitty ears, feather earrings, a black choker, steampunk jacket, a Starship Enterprise pin, dog tags, arm warmers, a pocket belt, a Nintendo game belt buckle, a five leaf clover patch, vertical striped tights, a steampunk blaster in a thigh holster and furry boots. And a light sabre. All of which Claire can be seen wearing or selling at any given moment.

I'm going to do a lot of clean up in Gimp to get rid of the extraneous pencil lines and hopefully punch up the color. I wanted the image to be detailed enough that it could be blown up and have interesting complexity or shrunk and still be readable.

If you haven't already, go check out Claire's etsy shop Five Leaf Clover and go buy things!

New old posters!

Nnrgh. My studio time has been EATEN for the past two days by a poster contest for the circus group I run. Making large scale poster art is so very anti-metalworking brain for me, it's been a struggle to get anywhere on my Artificial Tears piece. On the plus side, I made a kickin' poster that I'll try to photograph sometime tomorrow, but damn, it ate my life this week.

But! I do have art to blog aboot, although it's already appeared once here. I have a few Skül! posters left over from Christmas that I'm trying to get rid of. They're on my etsy all kinds of marked down because I want them OUT before I do another run of that print. So if anyone saw these when I first put them up and hungered for a delicious ink-skull of their own- have at it.

Here are the four remnants of my pre-holiday printing frenzy!

Trio 'o Shirts

I pulled these three shirts while yelling along with Amanda Fucking Palmer in the garage today. It's a Christmas commission for an etsy client, who specified the metallic fade ink and the designs. The photography is a little quick 'n dirty, but she loved the shirts.

I love how the ink faded out because of the placement of the skull. I was going to get brave and test my new 16" squeegee on this, but I chickened out and used my old 6" one instead.

This is the top half of the modified mannequin Michael made (say that 3 times fast) who occasionally models shirts for me. I never caught her name while Michael was around, but I've been called her Simone in my head. Her bottom half is white plaster over gold paint- any suggestions? Michael? Name your creation?

Dream of Trees

Screenprinting has been driving me crazy lately. Strike that- the incredibly bleak weather in the Pacific Northwest has been driving me crazy lately. But 3 weeks of it being too cold or wet to work in my garage studio hasn't been helping.

Paid commissions don't care what my levels of mental capacity are from day to day, of course. I've got two big jobs ("big" here is on a level corresponding to my one-person studio operations- three big jobs will pay my rent for a month) that I wanted to get done during my week off. I prepped, burned, and cursed out two screens for washing out COMPLETELY before I realized that all my fucking emulsion was expired.

There's nowhere to buy emulsion where I am, of course. I can drive an hour to Seattle and get shitty Speedball crap-in-a-can, or I can buy a new gallon online and wait two weeks- neither of which is an option for two jobs that need to be done by Friday.

The third option (according to the internet) is to overexpose my screens. I still have unpleasant memories of overexposing my first screens, but the internet apparently thinks that this is a wonderful idea. I have two freshly emulsed screens in my drying rack right now waiting to try this tomorrow, and if it doesn't work we're going to have to get REALLY creative.

Other things I've been waiting for with increasing frustration: American Apparel to stop making me jump through hoops to wholesale their clothes. I want to buy their stuff, I want to buy it cheaply, I want to put my shit on it and sell it. You'd think they'd want this too, but I'm in the middle of filling out my third resellers sales ID tax form for them this week.

Up top is a piece I forced myself to translated onto acetate because I haven't liked anything I've been able to make come out of my pencil in weeks. Below is the version I'm going to try to burn.

Someday I'll draw something that I actually want to see on a shirt. Someday.

I can has free market economy?

I admit it- I've been spending inordinate amounts of time working on screenprinting and typography jobs for clients and equally ridiculous amounts of time inventing new ways to take people's money in exchange for my art. Tweaking designs in Gimp. Prepping screens. Haggling to get the best price for my time and artistic energy. Giving discounts to friends and non-profits GOUGING EVERYONE WHO COMES WITHIN REACH OF MY GREEDY MAELSTROM OF SWEET SWEET EXCHANGE OF MY TIME AND ENERGY FOR THEIR COLD HARD CASH OH YES YES YES GIVE IT TO ME BABY.

Ahem.

So before anyone accuses me of creating art for my own sick capitalist gain, I would like to say- yes. God yes. I hereby brand myself before anyone else gets around to it. Dibs!

But yes, I've been doing all commissioned work lately and I loooove it. Nothing I can make public right now, but I'm starting to get more comfortable with Gimp and Photoshop for cleaning up logos and mocking up designs for folks. Most of the jobs have been for friends or local nonprofits, and those that haven't I've been able to pull out my shameless street performer mojo to make sure people know exactly how much my work is worth.

Here's to the system!


(If you couldn't tell, btw, my tongue is planted firmly in my cheek under that radical queer Bash Back! bandanna. Just so ya know.)

Rasterbation and Screenprinting, Part the Second: Some Ideas Come to Delicious Fruition

AW FUCK YEAH.

Tell me this doesn't look seriously cool. I'm pretty damn pleased with it- I was going crazy trying to find a blank throw away shirt to test this screen on, but then I remembered my left over Arches 88 paper and decided to just make a quick print. It's dirty- I used fabric ink because I couldn't find my acrylic- but it's gooood. Oh so good.

I ran a couple of shirts today, now that all three new screens are touched up and functional. I used one really nice white tank with the Psyche image:

I like how the image disintegrates over the lace, I might experiment more with that on a negligee I have.

And I worked a skull in white and black (the black version is on a beat up ribbed tank, so not much love there).

PLUS I started experimenting with different parts of the octopus stencil. This is the concept I've been rolling around in my head all along, isolated the tentacles and printing them separately on different parts of clothing.

Poll: More tentacles? Perfect number of tentacles? Less tentacles? (not actually possible on this shirt, but in the foooture, maybe).

Productive weekends FTW, y'all.

Fuck This Noise: Reducing Chatter in Linocut

Whoever came up with the phrase"Fuck this noise" was almost definitely a dissatisfied blockcutting artist trying to reduce chatter. I guarantee it. Chatter, for the uninitiated who still have all their fingers ungouged, is all those little lines in a block print that make shit look all folksy and old school. I generally declare filthy fucking war on chatter when I do linoblocks because I like the crisp look of positive impressions, but this also makes my life about 5 hours of work harder because you can carve away for ages and still not get all the noise. My finished piece still has some messy lines, but I'm okay with it to this degree. (also Steve the Studio Tech was about to kick me out)

The video slideshow I threw together up there is a fun little tour of about six or seven hours I spent inking up my block, cursing, carving away the chatter, inking up my block, printing, cursing, and rinse-repeating. I kept all my newsprint copies for funsies to track my progress, and it looks pretty spiffy in stop motion, plus I threw my original sketch in the beginning so y'all can see how it gets translated (I lost the "Hi" in the speech bubble because I carved it right reading, and everything gets flipped in linocut land so I just cut it out. Mercilessly.)

Here's the finished piece:

But oh wait what's this!

Oh yeah, the final assignment was for a card.

A card that likes you!

I vacillated over the sentiment for awhile, but I decided that having a nonverbal way to alert crushes that I liked them was pretty sweet and it makes me look all sensitive and adorable. The figure on the front is me, if you can't tell from the hair mess and glasses.

And of course, I slung it up on my etsy for capitalist gain. Of course.

Alas, poor Yorick!

Print 'o the day today- available in the etsy shop here. Oh, it is becoming so addicting.

Sombrero de Copa

Oh, yes yes yes, I am a printing fiend. Etsy shop is here, garage studio calls my name, I will continue trying to toss pieces up on here with somewhat regularity.