I’m setting off for several weeks of comics shows, trips, and talks, and things have been a bit busy! As I write this, I’ve just returned from SLICE in St. Louis and I have a few days rest before I head off to the Sheboygan Zine Fest. I haven’t had time to get a new comic done for you this week, so I thought instead I’d show off a few of the recent illustration projects I’ve been working on.

Project Good Apparel Designs

You might remember that several months ago I did a seamless repeating ramen pattern for a Project Good Apparel shirt! Well, they asked for a few new designs, a cocktails one and a dumplings one! I really love making patterns like this. It’s a serious (but fun!) challenge to get hand drawn elements to tessellate together so a design repeats seamlessly in all directions! None of these designs are available on their site yet, but if you follow them on insta or elsewhere, you can find where they’re doing popups and grab one!

Haiku Girl Summer Poetry Journal Cover

I’ve been online pals with Allyson, creator of Haiku Girl Summer, for a while now! She founded the Haiku Girl Summer project in 2022, which accepts haiku, senryu and haiga style poetry submissions from poets all over the world. This year, Allyson wanted to create a print collection of submissions from 160 poets, and was kind enough to ask me to design and illustrate the collection’s cover. I loved doing this project; I took inspirado from the collection’s title and imagined a dappled grassy field stretching out like a broad sky full of clouds and dotted with little star-like flowers, and then plopped a delicious picnic on top of it. You can purchase this poetry collection as a printed book or an epub!

Postcard for Buttondown

Earlier this year, Buttondown (this very newsletter platform!) asked me to illustrate a postcard they would be handing out with other swag at a tech conference here in Chicago. I decided to draw an elevated CTA train and some downtown Chicago buildings, surrounded by billboards advertising some of my favorite delicious Chicago-invented foodstuffs, like Atomic Cake and Jibaritos! This was a super fun project to work on, and the charming staff at Buttondown was kind enough to send me a stack of the printed postcards as well!

Spot Illustrations for Palenque LSNA

In recent years I’ve gotten involved with a local community organization called Palenque, which does important work on immigration, housing and education issues in my part of Chicago. I’ve done a few pro bono design and illustration projects for them, and most recently put together some spot art illustrations for them to use in print and web projects. These were delightful; just fun, colorful doodles that I know will be well used by a great organization doing valuable work.

The Cookie Book!

And of course I’m still diligently working on Let’s Bake Cookies!, the next installment in the Let’s Make series which I’m working on with the amazing Kim-Joy! The manuscript is done, and going through the editing process as I write this. In the meantime, I’ve already gotten started on the sketches. It’s going to be such an adorable and colorful book, and it’s an absolute delight to work on. Right now I have 22 of 176 pages sketched, so I have a VERY long road ahead of me, but I just love working on it. Please enjoy some of my cuter test bakes of the book’s recipes:

Upcoming Events:

Next up: Sheboygan Zine Fest is this coming Saturday, November 7!! I will have books and prints, and I’ll also be leading a recipe comics workshop AND a mocktail demo, so if you’re in the area, come out and say hi! More upcoming events are here.

What I’m Into:

I have been inhaling House of Margins by Tlotlo Tsamaase and it’s breathtaking. I put the audiobook on to keep me company for my drive to and from St. Louis this past weekend. A promising young author from Botswana has gone missing from a prestigious writers’ residency in South Africa. Her sister is still searching for her, and happens to find the missing writer’s cell phone, which has a mysterious app installed. In the meantime, one of the competing authors from the writers' residency has launched a successful and sensationalist podcast about the vanished writer without the family’s knowledge or permission. It’s a lyrical and surrealist horror novel about sexism and racism and colonialism and exploitation and a haunted house. I’m about halfway through, and I’m honestly not entirely sure I understand it, but the voice and the poetic prose and the fever dream of it all has me absolutely mesmerized.

What Toki’s Into:

The Young Prince had to go to the vet for a dental procedure! He had cracked one of his upper canines and it had to come out. :( The whole day definitely freaked him out, and when we got home, he tore a hole inside the lining of my favorite blue armchair and hid inside the chair for 12 hours. 😭 It’s been a rough week for him! But he’s gotten lots of wet food and churu treats, and he seems to be bouncing back nicely. Here is he freshly back from the vet, extremely high on cat drugs, with his little paw all bandaged up.