hello baltimoreans and beyond. if you like our town’s fine row houses and want to see a t-shirt printed of a drawing i made of some, please vote for this design. the drawing is based on actual row houses - some from calvert near chase and some from charles near the charles theater. thanks!

For some reason, this spring, I’ve been carrying around this mental image of a very tall Asian man taking a shower in a Western shower… Maybe its the flip side of the awkwardness some Westerners feel about Asian public baths?… To make the image I tried a different approach of cobbling together separate drawings and textures in Photoshop.

I was recently asked to make an illustration for a short story by Christina Lengyel, an MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore.  The story has a dark surrealist quality with a lot of strong dream imagery.  It was a challenge to try to include, what I thought were the key images into one drawing without it being too chaotic, but the spider-web, which appears in one of the dreams, provided a way to “weave” the ideas together onto one plane.  You can read the story on monologging.org.

thecrowandthewolfproject:

Not your Old-Fashioned Gameboard!

While visiting Baltimore we were able to connect with fellow MICA alum, Yutaka Houlette. Working as a pre-school teacher, musician and illustrator, he co-created the game Mixtum!

In collaboration with another MICA grad, Heidi Gustafson who runs Early Futures, an online resource/research site on edge thinking in early childhood education and also directed the experimental Children’s Think Tank (a research group run for and by children (right up our alley !:), the two inspired by their little ones, came up with Mixtum. The game board, a square limited edition printed masterpiece includes a spinner in the middle with three spokes that stop in different spaces, and three rings of images surrounding the circle. There are a potential of 32,768 different trios that can be chanced upon. The images are all carefully chosen illustrated symbols by Yutaka and Heidi.

This game is a creative tool for randomly selecting a trio of symbols to help generate unexpected ideas  Although the game began as a laboratory tool for preschool children to create new futures through synthesizing disconnected ideas and objects, Mixtum is a tool for anyone who is interested in the fringes of human imagination.  A central idea of futures oriented education is to help people create their own alternatives to the dominant view of the future.

A piece of art in it self and an incredible creative tool, Mixtum won us over. As artists who constantly develop creative tools to engage with communities as we travel, we snagged an edition of Mixtum while in Baltimore and will put it to the test on the road. We look forward to reporting back to Yutaka on our cross country exploration with the game!

YOU could learn more at their website AND purchase one too!

psst! great gift for the holidays! support local artists & businesses:)

i feel very lucky that one of my first illustration jobs was for a skateboard graphic! skate culture is part of what got me interested in visual art, so its cool to come full circle. now i have to start skating again.

I read a great article in the NYT by James Prosek a few years ago about how eel was actually the mostly likely centerpiece of the original thanksgiving.  This article inspired me to want to make a large Chinese-dragon-like eel puppet for the kids at school for our obligatory thanksgiving pageant.  Due to time and energy constraints, I ended up downsizing the idea and making small hand puppets instead.  I still couldn’t get the image of the large eel out of my head so I decided to make this drawing.      

This is a cover illustration for a book on counseling people in earthquake affected areas of Japan (written by my dad!).  I took a different approach putting this together - it was more like making a collage than executing a predetermined idea- and mostly all done in Photoshop.  Along the way, I ended up bringing out a fan brush, a sumi-ink brush and scanning my canvas tote bag.   

My friend’s Honda Civic recently gave up the ghost and I felt compelled to commemorate it somehow.  I took some cues from Hispanic low-rider art.  These Civics are such solid cars - the technology is at least 20 years old but it is competitive with most cars that are coming out now.  I think a reissue is due!  

I really abused this poor pencil, scribbling like hell to create the background for the above drawing.  My default choice would have been to mask the figures and watercolor the background, but I wanted something that evoked the frenetic energy of a child’s drawing.  The left side of the picture was staged (thank you Ms. Winnie!) and the right side was drawn mostly from my head.  It was fun to meld these two worlds.