Asian Heritage Street Fair

Hey everyone, I'll be vending as Monkey + Seal this Saturday from 11am-6pm at the Asian Heritage Street Fair.  The programming for the fair looks super cool, and there are a lot of other really great vendors.

It's on Larkin Street between Grove and Ellis.  Anyway, I'll be debuting two new tie designs (think badass ocean creatures), some new tie color combos on old favorites, and Eve and I will both have some new prints up for grabs, including my illustration "Dr. Madness."

Anyway, stop by and hang out and say hi!  Admission is free so we hope to see you there!

Building Stuff

After I got off of work on Sunday, I headed over to Big Umbrella Studios to go build a mobile display unit for our retail space.  I drew up some plans a while back, and the other co-owners got a chance yesterday to go pick up the wood.  Sooo, I worked from around 9:30-11:30 building this thing. 

Off to an inauspicious start, with some 1/2" pieces of plywood, and some 2x4s.

 

Added some supports to the sidewalls and working on building the bottom front of the display.

Sidewalls and front bottom attached.

Put the top on, possibly the easiest part of the entire building process 

Added some casters so that it's mobile!  Very useful in a gallery with movable walls where we might be changing up the retail space reasonably frequently.

 Ta-da!  Finished, and I started putting some merch on it.  The slanted front is to optimize the display of prints, and the big flat surface can hold tons more.  

Next I'll be working on a display for our ties (and simultaneously, I'll be getting ready for a split show with Eve on June 3rd.

Live painting

Boy do I love live painting!  I did this tonight at a fundraiser event for Japan.  I titled it "The Spirit of Japan Moving Forward" or something like that.  I actually don't remember the exact name, and some person will end up taking it home (at a super, super discount, I might add). Total paint time (for an 18x24) was about 3 hrs.

I did this with spraypaint, acrylic, and ink on a 6 ft x 8 ft movable wall at Big Umbrella for the Cobalt opening on April 14th.  It was super fucking cold out, and I think it helped get me sick.  Managed to bang this out in about 1.5-2 hrs.

Anyway, I really enjoy live painting.  I look forward to many more opportunities to do my thing live.  Fn fun stuff!

Stuff I've been up to

Painting for a charity auction in Stockton for the Go Red campaign to educate people about the dangers of women's heart disease.

Acrylic on canvas, 16"x20", titled "Savoring the Memory."

Laser Beam Bi-Winning

Not sure if this thing works, but trying to upload it anyway.  This was my "teach myself Flash in 1.5 hours with no manual" attempt this evening.

UPDATE: if you click the gif, it'll play in it's own little window, apparently.  At least with our computer and using Chrome.  Still LOTS of bugs to learn/work out, obviously.

Japan Art Fundraiser, My Bench!

I was super fortunate to check out an awesome fundraiser for Japan a while back put on by a super collaboration of Pixar, Dreamworks, Nickelodeon, and Mavericks Studios that went on over at Superfrog gallery in the New People building.

All the work was frickin' awesome, and I snapped a quick pic of superstar artist/fundraiser/badass Dice Tsutsumi's piece, which basically is not only the most appropriate painting ever to symbolize the Japan relief effort, but is masterfully done.

You can see his process (and a better photo) over at his blog HERE.  Dude is a super inspiring role model, basically living big off his art and also giving back big time (he organized the Totoro Forest Project, and is an awesome organizer, using his contacts with some of the biggest names in art today to help out awesome charities).  Basically, I hate this dude so much, only because I want to be able to do what he does so badly.

Also, as an update, my little Ballon Friend painting (below) sold at the Rise Japan Vol. 2 event the other night.  Yay!  Glad to know that I was able to contribute something to help out the recovery effort in Japan.

In other news, I took a class over at Techshop SF.  Eve and I took a tour of the shop as part of the Baz Biz holiday sponsorship, and they were offering a holiday special which I totally took advantage of.  So I took their Woodshop Safety and Basic Usage (SBU) class and learned how to use all sorts of saws, a sander, and I made a bench!

 Nalgene bottle, coffee cup, and messy room in the photo for scale

It was a huge pain in the ass carrying it home and on the bus (especially since I was also lugging around some paintings), but it was pretty awesome in that I could sit down where ever I wanted to.  For me, that one night, every bus stop had an empty seat.

Anyway, I hope to use the rest of my one-month membership to build a crap load of wooden stuff.  I also totally plan to cut and sand the crap out of a bajillion wooden panels to paint on.  Heck yeah!

10 min fig. study + new cute monster

Did a quick 10 min. figure study, instead of painting (like my old Academy instructors would prefer I do), I actually did the line sketch with black acrylic, then did some fills, hit a few highlights, and washed in a quick background.  Eh, cool.

I also did this new little cute monster thing.  I think his name is "Stabby."  He's not quite sure what to do with the knife, but I'm sure he'll figure something out. 

I find myself rapidly doing more and more of these cutesy little blog creatures, as opposed to my more nightmarish beasts or the horrific portraits.  Hmm, we'll see where this is all going.