2022 is the year of the tiger. I won’t go too much into my process this year, mostly because it was a lot faster and less tortured. What can I say? Occasionally, things are less fraught! I think part of that was just giving myself permission to…enjoy myself. Revolutionary. So that’s what I did. I wanted a really colorful card this year, and more of a full image instead of the minimalist design that I usually choose for my cards. Since my day to day job is in graphic design, it’s easy for me to default to a more design-oriented card, but after all, I trained as an illustrator and I wanted to showcase that. I wanted a warm, tropical jungle of color and texture for my tiger as this winter has seemed extra gray. Some of you may have seen on my instagram that I’ve been experimenting with some abstract painting. I think all those color experiments have opened me further to the color I’ve always loved, but have used sparingly, or purposefully. It’s been a tough couple of years and I think whereas I always wanted a reason to use a certain color before, I’m okay now with just using a color because it feels good. Isn’t beauty reason enough on its own? Beauty and pleasure have been in short supply over here, so in 2022, I’m saying yes to both of those! Happy Year of the Tiger, everyone! I hope it brings health, wealth, and abundant peace and happiness to all.
The Year of the Ox
It’s that time of year again—the time when I post to my blog! Otherwise known as Lunar New Year. You may recall that last year was a Metal Rat year (sounds so bitchin’!), so this is the Year of the Metal Ox! It’s time to straighten up and fly right, apparently, with the ox being the year of careful, slow, heavy building towards success.
I started sending out my postcard a couple of weeks ago, but I have a lot of them, so if you want one please send me your address! When my little cousin got hers, she asked me how I did it. Honestly, it’s what I’m always wondering too! So I broke it down and here are my steps:
Research oxen and symbols and colors and anything else that comes to mind.
Make some thumbnails for designs.
Start drawing, and then hate your drawings, so make more drawings.
Eventually, decide that they’re not terrible. Pick the least terrible one that will work with the design.
Find it doesn’t work and give up halfway through and have a snack.
Go back and see that maybe it will work after all. With a lot of futzing.
Do the futzing but try not to futz too much.
Call a friend for their opinion and make them look at a bunch of different variations.
Ignore your friend’s opinion (although this time I listened to his opinion because it agreed with mine lol) and finish the one you like.
Send it away to print.
Get it and love it!
Look at it a half hour later and hate it.
Decide you have to send it anyway because it’s what you’ve got printed.
See, making art is so fun!! Of course, it’s not always like this for me, and apparently for some people, it’s never like this (insert intense side eye here!). But I’ve come to accept my process. Even when I hate the things I’ve made, I know I will feel differently in half an hour and in the end, it will do what it needs to do.
I thought I would also share the contenders. I’m far enough away now that I don’t hate them anymore, but I’m sure if I had any of them printed, they would be equally loathsome to me! Welcome to my world!
This was when I was trying to wrap my head around the ox’s anatomy. Trying and failing! How do the horns connect? Who knows?! I eventually figured it out, but this is a drawing I don’t hate anymore, even though it is anatomically incorrect. I mean, we don’t hate Ken, do we?
By the time I got here, I had a more ox-like ox. But once I did this more literal ox, it really bored me! Of course, I don’t think anyone can draw a bull (or an ox in this case) without thinking of Picasso, or at least I can’t. I love his lithographic series exploring just how little information you need to convey the idea of an bull. I didn’t look at it because I didn’t want to copy it, but it lives in my head, so I knew it would come out if I was thinking about what was essential for me. I had done some reading on the ox: obviously he’s an enormous beast of burden which symbolically you might think of as “male,” but his role as an animal that is put into service so all his strength benefits others gives him a “female” aspect. This and the fact the they are often castrated! In Egypt, the bull is associated with the sun and depicted with a golden disk between its horns. But I thought since we are celebrating a lunar new year, and given the ox’s female association, I would make it a moon. Sorry, Hathor!
Once I started playing with these drawings in the design I made, the design also seemed very boring. Words on top, Ox on the bottom, yawn! It all seemed so expected. I liked the moon and I thought it would be pretty to have it printed with a silver foil detail. But still boring! What about that moon, I thought? Wouldn’t it be pulling on everything? I mean, it moves ALL THE WATER IN THE OCEAN! So I thought it would make sense if the moon were pulling the words towards it, and it would break up the very static design.
Imagine that moon is shiny foil, or send me your address and see for yourself!
The Year of the (Pizza) Rat
Happy Year of the Rat, everyone! Does anyone still blog anymore? I guess as long as Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz are still at it, I should put this up and think about posting a little more often [insert thinky-face emoji here]. I thought I would use this blog post to take you through how I made my annual Lunar New Year postcard.
2020 is the year of the metal rat. I don’t know what you think of when you hear the words “metal rat,” but I am reminded of the rats on the portico of the Graybar entrance to the Art Deco-inflected Grand Central Terminal. In that case, they symbolize the importance of New York as a hub of maritime trade. For me, it was enough that rats brought an association to Art Deco. Once I had a direction, I spent some time looking through this lovely book that my brother got me for Christmas for inspiration.
It shows how the Art Deco philosophy and sensibility spread through the design of the built world and applied and fine arts. I started drawing some thumbnails that married this aesthetic with the things I knew I wanted in the card: rats, gears, forms for 2020, along with Art Deco design motifs. Since this phase is about working out ideas, I try not to worry too much about getting anything “perfect” or “right.” I think of it as playtime to let me hand wander with some references in mind. Already, you can see I had a pretty entrenched color palette, for no other reason other than it’s one that I like. Gold/yellow/pink 4eva.
After going a little crazy with gears and thunderbolts and flower motifs, I decided to pare it way down to that design from the second thumbnail in the last image. After all, I wasn’t covering a building—just making a 4”x6” postcard! I painted the elements in gouache, and put them together in photoshop. I found a font that wasn’t too pricey and voilá, sent it off to Moo to be printed.
After I posted it on Instagram, I had a conversation with a friend in the comments that sparked another idea. What if i combined this concept with the Pizza Rat meme? You remember that little rat with the big appetite from 2015, right? You must because the video has been viewed over 11 million times! That exchange resulted in a new round of thumbnails and designs.
Since the end product wouldn’t be a postcard, but an instagram post, I rethought the design for a square format. Should I show the whole pizza? How much did the space have to scream “subway?” I definitely wanted to keep the rat (of course!) and the 2020, and the text (with modifications), but I decided I should just add a slice of pizza (pepperoni, in a slight change from the OG Pizza Rat), with just a suggestion of subway stairs. I experimented with a different color palette in my thumbnails, but eventually settled on expanding it to a reddish orange for the pepperoni and the crust, and bit of purple to make the rat sit on the subway stairs a little more firmly.
Now that you know what my card looked like, what does this year look like? The year of the rat is supposed to keep everyone busy busy busy! If the past couple of weeks is any indication, then that forecast is one hundred percent correct! I guess we’ll sleep in 2021, when it’s the year of the Ox!
The Year of the Pig
2019 is the very auspicious year of the Golden Pig in the Lunar calendar. It’s always a fun challenge as an illustrator to put together a card to go out for the Lunar New Year. Each year comes with a color, and a set of associations that make it fun to work with. In this case, pigs are supposed to be symbols of good fortune and wealth because they have large litters. All those little piglets mean abundance!
I made a print with a couple of pigs, one more naturalistic , the other a bit stylized. I did them in red since that’s always a good color for the Lunar New Year. I knew I would probably change the color to gold to fit with the year, but it’s always good to have different color options.
I decided I like the more naturalistic pig better. I only did them on top of each other because of the shape of the linoleum that I had, but I ended up liking the placement of one pig on top of the other so much that I decided to keep it for the final card. After all, two pigs have got to be better then one, right? I went back and did the type on a separate linoleum so I could have more control putting it altogether in photoshop. And here’s the final!
If you want to learn more about how your sign will do with all this pig energy, check out this lady’s video. Gung hay fat choy!
The Year of the Dog
2018 is the Year of the Dog in the Lunar Calendar, and I am so ready to turn the page on the Year of the Rooster. I was a little too exhausted and overwhelmed this past holiday season to send out holiday cards like I usually do. I just couldn't get into the holiday spirit. So I promised myself I wouldn't let the Lunar New Year go by without sending out some cards to my friends.
I started out doodling some dogs on a old throwaway piece of 18x24 paper because I thought it would make me happy to draw them kind of big, on paper I didn't care about, just for fun. I didn't really mean for it to become anything that I would send out or show anyone. If anything, I thought they would be practice dogs for a *real* piece that would come later. And then I let some of them be really silly and derpy because that's why we love them, right? They get so excited, jumping around, and they just can't hide that they love you, they love rolling in the dirt, and running fast. They love the world. I put in the words in any spaces that didn't have dogs, and decided they wouldn't be fancy script, but just straight-forward all caps. It seemed to suit the dogs I had drawn the best. I patched a few places where the ink had run or dripped, and then used up a whole marker (ha!) making them a yellow field to play in. By then, I had fallen a little in love with how silly they were, and I didn't want to draw them more accurately or "better." I felt it would take away some of their joy.
The rest of the story is Photoshop and Moo. By now, most of the people I've sent them to have received them. My friend Alex was kind enough to share on his Instagram, so you can see the finished postcard here. I still have a couple left, so if you didn't get one, leave me a comment or send me an email with your address and I'll send one to you!
People born in the Year of the Dog are supposed to have something of the dog's friendly, generous spirit, with a deep sense of right and wrong. Those traits are supposed to carry over to characterize the year, with people fighting for causes they believe in, according to one site I read. Happy Year of the Dog, everyone! May you have health, wealth, and prosperity in 2018!
The Year of the Rooster
Happy Lunar New Year! When this website told me that the 2016 (the Year of the Monkey) was going to be the "wizard of the impossible" last year, little did I know how true that would turn out to be. I don't remember a year when every piece of conventional wisdom was turned on its head. This year, I am ready for the Rooster when it says "I am alert/ ready to take action" because that's exactly how I feel. "Never give up or in," the Rooster says. If these first few days of the new administration are anything to go by, we have a long, hard road ahead of us in the next four years, and I, for one, am taking the Rooster's advice.
Year of the Monkey
Happy Lunar New Year! 2016 is the year of that wizard of the impossible, the monkey! Now is the time for creative energies and inventive minds to flourish: apparently, in the year of the monkey, all bets are off. According to this website, it's going to be a good year for my sign, the Rabbit. "Progress, finally!" it says. Sounds good to me.
I made a couple of collages for the Year of the Monkey. It seems to be all about experiments and new things, so it seemed appropriate for me to try to push forward in a new medium.
Year of the Horse
The Lunar New Year has just passed, and so I sat down with some watercolor and a roll of very thin paper to do a little horse watercolor. The paper's not really meant to take all this water, and you can see that in all the wrinkles and marks of the water evaporating. I don't know if I just like breaking all the rules, or the impressionistic effect.
Once I amp it up in Photoshop, of course, it takes a more intense feeling. I couldn't decide which I liked better, so I'm posting them both.
Here's wishing you and yours health, wealth, and prosperity!
Once I amp it up in Photoshop, of course, it takes a more intense feeling. I couldn't decide which I liked better, so I'm posting them both.
Here's wishing you and yours health, wealth, and prosperity!
Congratulations!
Lately, happily, there have been a spate of happy events — weddings and births mostly. I have a Thank You card, printed from a linoleum I cut a few years ago, but I never had a Congratulations card until now! Some of you may remember the Chinese Lunar New Year bunny prints I made back in 2011. Since then, rabbits on cards has become a theme with me. They just seem appropriate because in the Chinese horoscope, rabbits are social and gregarious, and I think of the card going out as my little social ambassador to bring the recipient my felicitations.
Happy Year of the Snake
I made a print for the Lunar New Year to celebrate the Year of the Snake! It's supposed to be a year for steady progress and attention to detail. Does it sound like a barrel of monkeys? Perhaps not; I guess it's time to straighten up and fly right! There's a methodical side to me that loves the idea of steady progress, even though in practice I'm usually about fits and starts. Here's to a healthy, happy and prosperous Year of the Snake!
The Year of the Rabbit
Happy Chinese New Year, everyone! I'm particularly looking forward to this year, because I was born in 1975, making me a rabbit in the lunar horoscope. This means it's gonna be *my* year! If you're a rabbit too, here's the deal. We are articulate (check), talented (*blush*), and ambitious (well, two out of three's not bad). We like to be comfortably at home, pursuing our quiet little bunny pursuits, but we are gregarious too and like to surround ourselves with friends and family - as long as there's no conflict. We are big conflict-avoiders. But enough about me. How about a few block prints?
Congratulations and be prosperous!
Congratulations and be prosperous!