TL;DR:

New lino prints for pride season, Carmilla illustration series, upcoming workshops, unannounced secret projects (!!!), drag, and ice skating!

To Whom It May Concern,

I hate using social media. I hate tech companies and I hate the centralized internet. In an effort to force myself to share my work more despite these angry feelings, I’m making a compromise and giving myself a non-algorithmic, non-app based place to update people on what I’m up to. This is mainly inspired by my older brother Nathaniel, who insists that people will bother to read a large amount of text if they’re sufficiently interested in what I do. I’ll believe it when I see it.

For now, I’ll make it worth your while to open this email with some juicy updates. There are lots of pictures, I promise.

Art

In preparation for pride season, I’ve been making new linocuts and prints. For those who don’t know, I’m a member of SpookyHaus, a San Francisco based art co-op. They are the reason I am vastly more popular in SF than I will ever be in ABQ, and also my main source of art income other than commissions. They gave me my excuse to (generally) give up on craft/art markets, because I could never sell my prints as well as they do, so why try.

Anyways, my major development in the realm of printmaking is this: grey ink. I think it makes my images much easier to read, and just generally prettier. Turns out stark black-on-white is a little eye-hurty.

The lower contrast of the grey ink is nicer on the eyes. I also finally printed a block I made last year as a demo for a class at ARCH art supplies in San Fran— but I forgot to bring it, and it languished in The Block Pile for 7 months.

Friends in the Bay, keep an eye out for another on of these classes later this year. It was ridiculously fun the first time. I am going to make one more new carving to ship before pride, so the next newsletter will probably be a step-by-step write-up of my linocut process.

And— Newest exciting announcement is that I will finally be teaching a linocut class in Albuquerque! It will be on June 27th at Grandma’s Coffee Garden, with very limited spots available. I will post more details on Instagram, and of course here as well.

Currently these prints are only available in person at SpookyHaus booths (but if you’re in ABQ and you want one… DM me).

In other art news, I repainted the figure/portrait in this piece I made last year, which is part of a series of illustrations based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. I’ve been working on this series as part of the portfolio overhaul I’ve been suffering through since early last year.

These were an attempt to copy my boyfriend’s process, which involves drawing/painting each element on a separate surface and then combining them digitally so that that final is more easily edited. I normally do everything on the same paper, but I’m trying to figure out ways to be more adaptable given that most art directors expect their illustrators to make revisions even late in the process… and I’m desperate to be more hireable 😀😀. I’m hoping in this cursed timeline of AI takeover, that the unavoidable quirks of traditional painting will be at least tolerated by those who value the handmade look, but… idk.

Below is the second in this series, which I started in like June of last year (jesus christ), but I’ve been unhappy with it for so long that I’m planning to scrap it and start over. At a certain point you have to just accept defeat. This is the privilege of being a subscriber; access to my secret shames and failures.

Other privileges of being a subscriber? Art that I can’t post on Instagram for fear of censorship! (Or, to be honest, things that I don’t want on my main account). So, to celebrate, here are some unreleased drawings from the sketchbook archives.