A Valentine from Me to You
Color-Coded Music Mix, Zines in West Virginia, Pops the Pay-Per-View Corn, Sketches for Highlights, a Rant about Live Trace, Bumper Stickers and More!
I have been doing mind-numbing (aka: soothing) things, like creating playlists to catalog the rainbow based on the colors of my liked songs on Spotify. Here is one for RED, which is my dorky Valentine from me to you. It’s accompanied by a meditative time-lapse of me drawing a heart on a scrap of blue that I later photoshopped onto Ricky Nelson, Talking Heads, Bettie Serveert, and Hall and Oates album thumbnails. Yes, I am a professor of graphic design.
Currently, I am typing this from a very cold Jiffy Lube lobby. I will send this out today (February 12th, 2025), and nothing will stop me. Not even an oil change or the world that is throwing outrage after outrage at a rapid-fire pace. I have had a draft of this email open in my tabs for a few weeks now. It was open when I traveled to Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, for a few days at the end of January. While I was there, I was named the Joan C. Edwards Distinguished Professor in the Arts and spent the week facilitating zine and drawing workshops with the art and design students. I also gave a talk in a full and fun room of students and community members, where I gleefully gave away prints and zines. Marshall University knows how to show the eff UP!
In two days, I am taking a red eye to Hartford, Connecticut, where I am going to go into slumber party mode with my forever friend Jenni for a few days and then hang out at the Hartford Art School to have some chats with printmaking and book arts students. I am part of the Auerbach Lecture Series, so if you are in the area, I am giving a public talk on Monday, February 17th. Then, I will be done with trips for a few months. I love, love, love visiting schools and talking with folks, but I also love being home. If you need an overly enthusiastic riso and zine enthusiast to come to your school or event, I am your gal.
Also, shout out to my Hartford, Connecticut hosts Jenni and Brian, who have always had the most comfortable house and couch. I have many, many, many good grad school memories of hunkering down in their living room to watch the newest episode of The Sopranos, Queer as Folk, and American Idol (timeframe was 2001-2003 for context). During this time, Brian worked in marketing for Time Warner Cable in Lincoln, Nebraska, while Jenni went to grad school for printmaking. Brian enlisted me and other grad school friends to film a stellar commercial promoting their newest feature, Pops the Pay Perview Corn, and it was shot in their cozy living room on their cozy couch. Brian was the voice of Pops. Corn, well, because we lived in Nebraska. Go Cornhuskers! This commercial is almost 25 years old, so maybe a sequel is needed. I will get on this.
In freelance news, I am working on a June feature for Highlights Magazine, which also includes the freaking cover. I am beyond excited about this opportunity and should be working on it instead of making playlists organized by color. The above image is the first of many piles of drawings for the June issue. I love to draw on tracing paper for my freelance work. It feels less precious and takes up less space when I archive the drawings. I also believe that the smooth surface preserves the pen tip longer. I draw with a chunkier pen (Faber-Castell Brush) than I use for my daily drawings (Faber-Castell Fine Brush) because the thicker line translates better when I vectorize. If anyone is curious, I use the online vector program vectorizor.io, which is my replacement for Vector Magic, which I used from about 2009 until last year. I HATE Adobe’s livetrace feature. There was one week in July of 2023 when Adobe introduced an update to livetrace, and it worked in the ways I needed it to work for a solid month. Then they introduced another update, and it was worthless again. Seriously, don’t even get me started. I have no idea if this minutia is interesting. However, it’s part of my process, and I am still very committed to drawing with actual pens and converting to digital vs digital illustration. This is the stubborn hill that I will die upon.
I need to let you know that the Dumb Phone app I purchased for $12 a few weeks ago and discussed in this newsletter is still on my to-do list to set up and use. I have GREAT intentions; I do. Other highlights of this week include Hank fully committing to these black and white checked shirts as his signature look, watching the brilliant movie Flow (seriously, all of the thumbs up, five stars, sincerely recommend), and finally admitting that my shoe size has gone up a size since having a child six years ago (hence the replacement black chucks from FB Marketplace).
I have two weeks of Daily Purchase Drawings to share because of travel, The World, and having had this tab open for a few weeks. Notable mentions from this batch include my airport book purchase of Martyr, which I devoured and am still thinking about. I am looking for another book to escape into, so I am all ears. I also bought a necessary/unnecessary blank book from the Paper Epiphanies store at the PDX airport.
The inside pages look like this, and I was seduced to spend some coin on another blank book. It’s part of my daily carry (along with my Little Otsu planner and Shinola sketchbook).Â
I want to highlight a new program that Leland initiated for 2025 at Outlet. We are always looking for ways to support our community as a small arts business, and our 2025 effort to pay it forward is our Community Give Backs program. We select one organization or mutual aid group monthly to donate 10% of our print sales. You can learn more about the places we picked out on our Give Backs page, so please check out some of these incredible resources in the Portland community and support them! And, if you live in Portland, come print with us to help us raise lots of $$!
Also, Leland just listed several of their prints on the Outlet website, so if you like super vibrant, color-packed prints, you should go and take a look!
I will leave you with a suggestion: Read this latest post from my former student, former studio mate, and dear friend Nicole Lavelle. I woke up to it this morning and loved reading every thoughtful word.
She does many amazing things, including running a fundraising sticker business that has raised $17,000 for various organizations since 2020. She needs to make the above two sticker sketches a reality because I want to purchase and draw them. You know the drill.
As always, thanks for reading and supporting, and I will write more soon,
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Go Cornhuskers!