Ktichen Thoughts

It's a beautiful Saturday morning in San Francisco, sunny and warm with the arrival of our elusive Indian summer — a curious term with a curious etymology, but a time that nonetheless makes us natives break out the shorts and sandals for their twice-yearly airing. Sitting here in the loft after a wonderful breakfast of huevos rancheros, putting the plates back on the shelf and finishing my french press, I was reminded of a post I put up on CRAFT back in the spring (the other nostalgic season) on kitchen thoughts ... I hope you'll investigate, and share some of your favorite kitchen items.

Design Space Series on Craftzine

Just wanted to let y'all know about the Design Space series on Craftzine. In honor of last month's theme, Design & Photography, Nat and I put together some fun Q+A profiles on four creative studios based in San Francisco — MINE, Sony Ericsson, Chronicle Books, and Volume Inc. Shown here are a few highlights from our adventures. The project was so much fun that I'm sure we'll be extending it to new faces and places in the future. I'll be sure to keep you posted!

Big thanks to Christopher Simmons, George Arriola, Suzanne LaGasa, and Eric Heiman and Adam Brodsly.

Design Notebook: Nature Textures Library

Hello all. I wanted to share with you my new column for CRAFT, Design Notebook. I (finally) wrote my first post this week, on creating your own textures library. I've included an excerpt here on TT, and you can check out the post in its entirety on the CRAFT blog. I've included some select shots from this project — please feel free to grab them for your own use, copyright free!



As a designer, I have a great love as well as a professional need for visual lexicons. Type faces, illustration, ephemera, old signage — you name it, I collect it. Textures are no different. It's not infrequent that a texture is needed for a design project, and what better way to amass a royalty-free collection than to generate it yourself!

In this post I will address some basic tips for finding and capturing textures with your digital camera, and share with you some selects from my nature texture library. All of these photos were taken while hiking in the beautiful regional parks of Northern California. They are free for you to grab and use however you want — have fun!

In the next post, I will go over how to zoom waaaaaay in on your photos to create a specific color pallet from individual pixels using imaging software. Stay tuned!








A special note of thanks. This project was inspired by Bay Area artist Matthew Jervis, who has been taking amazing texture shots and open sourcing them in a Facebook album. Super sweet idea! You can find more on Jervis at Kulture Hero.

Surprise Art Box: Strigiformes, Stage III

So the show was a success! SABP took over SOM bar in the Mission for 3 hours last Saturday afternoon and we had a really great time. There were fewer than expected artists, a tribute to the fact that everyone is so busy these days. But even so, we filled out the space quite nicely. To date I only have 2 of my 20 pieces left. The rest have found happy homes and I am thrilled.

I wanted to follow up on the painting process. Last post I wrote, only the 6 original watercolors and 20 transfers had been completed. All my small panels had been embellished with black and white owls. While these looked fairly cool, they did not feel complete to me and so I began adding color, something I was hesitant to do. At first I merely painted solid colors around the transfers. But then I began to do light washes over the owls and saw their features change and differentiate into truly individual personas. This was rewarding, creating new characters out of the same basic prints. Upon advice I started pairing up the owl prints and doing doubles on a single canvas. The more things I tried the freer I felt, and by the end I wished I had another 20 panels to paint.

For me, the greatest part of this process, start to finish, was having to let go of the outcome. That probably sounds trite, but as anyone undergoing a creative venture knows, where you start and where you end never match, and it's the challenges you're obliged to adapt to that make it great. I had starting this project wanted to do a new kind of image-making, and I think I achieved that. But I had also wanted to leave my controlled brush and penchant for color behind, creating spectral images that played lower notes. I could not accomplish this, and I can't say why. I hope in the future to better abandon instinct and explore new visual territory. That to me seems the mark of a growing artist. The ability to leave all past work behind and tackle something truly unknown. Regardless, I achieved my primary goal: fun. This was a great deal of FUN. And I got the paints out for the first time in a long time, and it felt great, and I think the series turned out wonderfully.

Surprise Art Box 03 will happen in September 2010. I have already started my next series. There is something so wonderful about the size and the price point — a winning combination for sure! Give me a large blank canvas and I panic. Give me 20 tiny canvases and I swoon. Next up, bugs!

Surprise Art Box: Strigiformes, Stages I & II

April 24th marks the next Surprise Art Box group show, and heavens help me, I'm in it. Now, I'm not really an artist, I'm a designer. But I miss the brush and paints and the tangible satisfaction of the hand. Because my natural illustrative talents sort of dry up past verbatim rendering, I wanted to try solvent transfers (with a blender pen) to hopefully take my imagery to new and unforeseen levels using the transfer process as a buffer to explicit depiction.

Shown here are steps 1 and 2 of the complete process — the initial watercolor illustration (done from bird field guides) and the toner transfer on primed wood panel. To get the transfer I first scanned my watercolors in 8-bit grayscale, bumped up the contrast in Photoshop, flipped and printed them. I then photocopied the printouts with a toner photocopy machine. Note: you have to use toner, ink won't work; color photocopies are OK. Flipping the image is important (especially with type) because your print will come out backwards from what you see on the paper. I then held the photocopies face-down to the panels and used the blender pen to saturate the paper, transferring the toner to the wood. I should mention that I decided to do double transfers with multiple photocopy printouts, one atop the other, to darken the results, and I used a burnisher to help make the toner stick. Future steps are TBA, as I have no idea what I'll do next! Dare I introduce color? This is an organic if imprecise process. Stay tuned!

I should mention that I'm really into owls these days, and it was their spectral quality that led me to chose transfer printmaking as my image making method. I've been painting birds for a while, but when I found the owl illustrations in a 1961 second edition of Peterson's A Field Guide to Western Birds, I became enamored. They are no doubt agents of the spirit world — noiseless, mothlike, nocturnal, with almost tribal "facial disks" and feather tufts. My aspiration is that the imprecise nature of toner transfers will lend a ghostly character to these birds. So far I'm pretty happy with the results.

In case you're not already familiar, SABP was founded in 2009 by Bay Area artist Matthew Jervis. The basic idea was born of the mystery boxes available in specialty toy emporiums such as Kid Robot. An artist creates limited edition collections of 20 3"x3" pieces which are displayed in full but sold individually at random — the buyer doesn't know which one he'll get. "Its like a gumball machine full of cool art by awesome artists. Put yer money in, twist the knob and see which one you get." Be sure to check out Jervis' incredible 100 Faces project.

Geographer: Animal Shapes

I recently had the pleasure of designing local San Franciscan 3-top Geographer's new EP, Animal Shapes, aka 6 tracks of total bliss, to be released March 9, 2010. This image, along with the one for their Kites LP, was created with the help of buddy Drew. Be sure to check him out at i am drew bennett. And don't miss the CD release party, Friday March 11 at the Rickshaw Stop! Yeehaw!

The New Face of CRAFT

What can I say? I'm just really really ridiculously busy. But for now I can happily share with you the new face of CRAFT, which just launched today! Behold the fruits of our excessive labors:

"The new Calendar section features all the upcoming craft events and fairs coming to a city near you. Our Projects area, let's you easily browse through all of our recent DIY projects and on every page you'll be able to go to specific crafting categories, archives, and search for what you want! You'll also be able to go to our Craft Podcast: Videos and Patterns area directly from the top navigation. Our Crafter section has a brand new profile on Anna Maria Horner. Find out about her inspiration, her new Little Folks Fabric line, and how she juggles work and her six kids! Sign up for the CRAFT: Newsletter and be entered in our giveaways each day this week! Today we'll be giving away a Yudu from Provo Craft! All entries close at 8am PST, December 2nd. Stay tuned tomorrow morning and the rest of the week to see what other cool goodies we are giving away!"

FLATMANCROOKED: Not About Vampires

I am pleased to announce the impending release of Not About Vampires: An Anthology of New Fiction Concerning Everything Else, coming at you courtesy of FLATMANCROOKED. "You won’t find an undead night-dweller anywhere inside the book, but there’s brand new work from one of America’s contemporary high horror masters, Brian Evenson, as well as tremendous new stories from some of this country’s most promising young talents. The anthology includes the top eleven stories from Flatmancrooked’s inaugural short fiction contest judged by Aimee Bender, with stories from first-prize winner Kevin Walsh, N.A. Jong, J. David Stevens, Josh Peterson, and many more, as well as brand new fiction from Shya Scanlon and Thomas McCafferty." Cover art by Kevin Best, design by yours truly.

Open Source Embroidery

In honor of the Open Source Embroidery show at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art (MoCFA) in San Francisco, I would like to share my first (and to date only) LED embroidery — birthday cupcake! This little experiment was created at Maker Faire Austin 2008, and was made possible by the patience, expertise, and tutorage of friend and co-worker Becky Stern, whose Lily Pad embroidery is shown above. Also partaking in the show is friend Travis Meinolf, who will be hosting one of the ongoing workshops of this event, teaching patrons how to weave. It cannot get any cooler than this! Come out and join us this Thursday, October 2, starting at 6pm. More electronic embroidery with Becky at CRAFT.

Big Thanks

Big thanks to Brookelynn for posting TT on craftzine — you totally made my day! Check out Mrs. Morris and all her crafty doings online and in print. Her new book, Feltique, is out now.

Go Write A Novel

That is all.

Geographer: Kites

I am very excited to announce the release of Geographer's brand new 7-inch: Kites. Recently signed to Tricycle Records, Geographer is a highly listenable guitar-cello-drums trio with diverse sounds, stellar lyrics, and haunting voices. Honest to god I played Innocent Ghosts [their first full-length album] for 2 weeks straight when I got it. The release show will be at Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco, Friday October 2. Check out the KQED Arts write-up. 7-inch art by Drew Bennett. Design by yours truly.

Wall Birds

Two years ago I decided to start finding uses for the stacks of old calendars and scrap paper I pack around with me like a greedy hermit crab. I began to sketch birds drawn from field guides onto the more undesirable side of my paraphernalia — the tree is made from the ghost prints of an old woodblock I did ages ago — and cut out the forms with an X-acto. This project became one of the few art exercises I've done recently that didn't consume my mind with concept or execution — it was just scrap paper! I wasn't worried how they turned out, and this ended up being very liberating. Next up: how to mount them to the wall without using tape ... suggestions?

Alphabet Posters

woodblock print by Teagan Tall


from Trendy peas. Visit the etsy shop here. [via print & pattern]


by Tim Fishlock [via Baby Gadget]


Photogram alphabet by Dutch Osborne. [via Cookiemag.com]


from Beauchamping [via Spiny Squirrel]


Tapeography by Ersinhan Ersin [via CRAFT]

Toilet Paper alphabet. Artist, Unknown. [via Central St. Martin]

As a graphic designer, I hold a special place in my heart for alphabet posters. Here are a few that I really like, including one I did myself using woodblock type. For a stellar selections visit the blog of Reuben Miller [via ohdeedoh].

Twitcher

As children, my dad used to drag us kids out in the field at ungodly hours with the promise of funds for positive identification: 10 cents a species. $5 for a golden eagle. It's no small wonder I never much cared for birdwatching, but I did develop a love of the flighted subjects. These two are the beginnings of what I hope to expand into a series of bird portraits. Stay tuned.