I was asked to do some illustrations for the Portland Mercury this week about Portland’s MLS soccer team, the Timbers. They are having their home opener this week and the article alongside these illustrations was an A to Z of fun facts about the team. Of course, when needing an illustration of a letterform with facial hair, who else would they turn to but me?
The top three letters were all together as one illustration, this one was later in the article.
I printed these 5 by 7 screenprints to sell at shows and give away with other print orders. And, it’s how I feel about anyone reading this right now!
Now that Man’s Face Stuff has four different regular scents, we felt it was time to make them a little more distinct when sitting on store shelves. Here are the new color mockups for our four waxes. As soon as the tins we have run out, we will start using these new ones.
Man’s Face Stuff is, of course, available at www.mansfacestuff.com, and we have a Facebook fan page too for you Facebookers.
You regular viewers may remember this image from a few weeks ago. My school is putting on a tarot card themed print exchange this year, and I finally printed these up late last week. I made a polymer plate of the image and letterpressed them (at the IPRC) onto French Paper’s Pop-Tone Whip Cream paper.
The first 41 prints of the limited edition of 48 prints are for the print exchange, so I’ve only got the last seven up for sale in my Etsy shop.
Also: There’s about three weeks left to turn in your BEARFIGHT submissions!
The building that houses my studio also has a mural-only space in the entryway called the Ephemeral Gallery. A different artist comes in each month to paint a mural on this 15 by 8 foot wall space, and at the end of each month, it gets whitewashed. I got asked to do it for February, and finished it all in about 7 hours yesterday.
The phrase came from a conversation I had with a friend last week. We were discussing how many friends we both had who are artists, craftspeople, small business owners, and how we really try to support them when we can and that we sincerely wished that everyone we knew could be famous for what it is they do. That sentiment seemed appropriate for a building full of creative offices.
Here I am hard a t work. Photo by Sarah Oleksyk.
If you happen to be in Portland, it will be up the rest of the month at 412 NW Couch St. It’s right by the entryway doors, so you can even see it well at night if you come by and the doors are locked.
Progress shots and whatnot are up on my Flickr.
This is what I do when I’m bored at lunch. Usually I just write little lists of words in series, changing a single letter as the words progress, or playing around with spelling or simple phrases, but since this wordplay was a little more fancy-looking than usual, I thought it would be appropriate for Typo Friday this week.
Just playing around with a phrase that’s been running through my head lately. I watched a biography of Ben Franklin a few weeks ago and it informed me that on the earliest paper money in Philadelphia, which Ben Franklin printed himself, the phrase “to counterfeit is death” appeared. (See below) He also made copper plates of actual leaves and their unique vein structure as another deterrent to would-be counterfeiters.
For the entire time I have lived in Portland, this building in my neighborhood, once a convenience store, had been in great exterior disrepair; this included the ghost image of the sign for what was most likely the original tenant of the building, dated 1891. A few months ago, I noticed workers preparing to repaint the exterior of the building, and I was worried because it’s on a much-used bike route of mine and seeing even the remnants of old, hand-painted signs always warms my heart. Much to my surprise, when they repainted the rest of the building, they repainted the original signage as well!
I had never seen that done before, and certainly would not have assumed they would do it with such a basic sign like this one, but it made me happy and I thought it deserving to be part of Typo Friday this week. Has anyone else seen an old sign get repainted when the new tenants refurbish the space?
