Charles Osborn & David Woods

This fall & winter I’ve had a temporary roommate in my friend Lauren, a new LA transplant. She just found a permanent home in the hills (with a spectacular view of which I’m pretty jealous) so I’ve been working on getting my apartment back in order. It was great to have her (though I was so busy those months I could barely appreciate it) but only-child me is happy to re-rearrange. This means my studio is actually my studio again, not a Japanese-hotel-tiny bedroom, and my living room is a living room and not a studio with a couch in it. And most excitingly, my bedroom is my bedroom and not Lauren’s.

(Living room pre-roommate. Yes, it’s extremely twee.)

I’ve been taking this overhaul as an opportunity to redecorate slightly and I’ve been looking for some large-scale art for my bedroom walls (what I really, really, embarrassingly intensely want is one of these or one of these but 98 frivolous dollars I do not have). I was browsing Etsy tonight and happened across the OsbornWoods shop and was just absolutely delighted.

First of all, this is one of my favorite kinds of art/design: from the 50s and 60s, bold & graphic but with a clear feeling of being handmade, brightly colored and really playing to the strengths of screenprinting or lithography. Furthermore, all the posters are deadstock which means that they most likely feel and smell (OK, sorry, I’m weird) amazing. They’re not some digital reproduction, it’s the real thing. And while you can pry my computer and my Wacom from my cold dead hands, I still maintain that there is something incomparable about a piece of paper where the ink has really been slapped on and soaked up.

And oh my lord one of them is a botanical poster! And remotely affordable!

This is the one I chose:

The store profile piqued my curiosity so I looked up a little bit more about these two and they are pretty fascinating. Partners and collaborators living in California (yay), they accomplished a huge amount outside their already prolific art practice–historical preservation & archiving, founding museums (& a teddy bear convention…?), fostering community and starting what looks like a really cool radio station. Here are a few articles I found–I’m sure there are more. I’d love to have a book about these two.

Gravel & Gold, Large Mammal (what a great name!), Imprint.

So, needless to say, I am extremely excited about seeing this beauty in person. And since I just got a Yudu…I’m feeling pretty inspired.

Without A House

I had the pleasure of working with my good friend Tyrrell Shaffner, filmmaker extraordinaire and Executive Producer at SpiritClips, on a holiday-themed short film. I created drawings which were then animated by the talented Mika Tanisaki to produce a motion comic of Tyrrell’s sweet story of a man struggling to give his daughter a happy Christmas during the Great Depression. The film is viewable here but requires a SpiritClips membership, so I’d like to share some of my illustrations below to give a taste of the project. Tyrrell also wrote a great post about the inspiration for the film on her blog.

This was a really fun project to work on–I hadn’t done animation work since college, and while it’s extremely labor intensive it was a great exercise to have to think in a motion framework again. I also created all the drawings directly in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet, which is different from my usual style of hand-drawing and scanning in.

 

Pennsylvania Christmas

Fake Anything

I am loving Misty Manley’s blog “Fake Anything”–such a fun concept. I’m hoping things calm down a little in these here parts (this past month has included a commissioned portrait, super labor-intensive drawings for an animation, two days a week on t-shirt duty, and an impending textile project starting the second the animation is done–not to mention a week-long trip back east and the fact that I’ve been sick as a dog since Monday) so I can brainstorm some ideas to submit.

PHARMA @ Cooper Union

I was in New York City a few weeks ago, but not quite in time to see what looks like a fantastic design show at Cooper Union. Wish I could check this one out.

I want to go to there

Melbourne Museum, via Lovelorn Unicorn

Echo Park Lake Draining Bingo!

They’re currently draining the lake next to my house as part of a huge rehabilitation project and I got curious about what might be found at the bottom. Ever since I heard about the project a couple of years ago, I’ve been joking that we should take bets on the findings…but bingo sounds even more fun!

(Thanks to The Eastsider for featuring me!)