LO Studio Blog

postcard preview

2008-04-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

We just turned in this new project to the printer, but we're so excited that we wanted to share! Jennie Smith and Jessica Seamans came up with the idea to do a postcard set together while Jessica was spending a month in San Francisco with Jennie. While it didn't get finished before Jessica headed home to Minneapolis, the seed was planted and each artist drew and watercolored 5 postcards of a themed collection. We put it together into a nice little book of perforated postcards. I won't ruin the surprise of seeing each postcard for the first time, but here's a teaser of what you'll find inside...

We'll let you know as soon as we get them back!

new cards!

2008-04-09T21:38:00.000-07:00

Too bad Washington Mutual has taken over woohoo (although they have trademarked it with a weirder spelling), but never mind. Woohoo! We've got a new batch of cards from a lovely batch of artists known as Jo Dery, Pepa Prieto, Jeremy Tinder, and Scott Barry. Yay!

Q & A with Allison Cole

2008-03-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the first in our series of artist Q & A. Allison Cole recently completed The Tour Diary for us and took some time away from making art to talk about travel, life after RISD and getting drunk on an airplane.

Do you travel much? Any trip in particular that stands out?

Not as much as I used to....now most trips that I take are just hopping on the train down to NY. When I was in college I had the opportunity to spend 6 weeks in Rome, that was a pretty amazing trip!

Are the drawings in the book based on personal experience? (like have you ever gotten drunk on a plane to relieve flight anxiety?).

I always get drunk on a plane! I am the worst flyer ever, I hate the whole experience!

How did you come to have the character style you use in the book and in your comics as a stand-in for more realistic drawings of people? When it's based on someone you know, how do you figure out what you will change about the character to make it look more like that person?

I really don't know how it all started, it wasn't a deliberate effort to start drawing people like that, it just kind of happened one day. Guys are a little harder to define with details than girls, but it's usually an accessory or something that really reminds me of the person.

You are focusing more now on cut paper for your art shows. What brought you to cut paper instead of doing drawings?

I think that all comes back to my printmaking background and my complete inability to paint. With printmaking you have to come up with an idea and then break it down to layers and flat color. I tried painting that way and it didn't work out too well at all, so I turned to the cut paper and it all just made sense from there.

The Tour Diary is drawn mostly with a tablet, right? How has using a tablet changed your art, if at all?

I love drawing with a tablet and working in Illustrator for illustration work, it is so much more time efficient than scanning drawings into Photoshop. And you can really zoom in and get down to the details. I don't think I could ever draw an entire graphic novel with a tablet, but for certain purposes it makes a lot of sense.

Besides drawing comics and doing paper cut art you also make wallets and bags for your online shop called Bang! Bang! You're Thread. When and how did you start crafting?

I've been sewing and stuff like that for years...I became involved when I started participating in RISD student sales (they put together about 2 a year) local Providence-area craft shows and going to comics conventions. Pretty much the whole experience of selling self-published comics at these events and to stores opened my eyes to all of the fun things I could be making! And the internet and having a website really helped too.

You went to RISD and still live in RI. What is the art community like there and was that a part of why you wanted to stay? It seems like a lot of people who went to RISD are involved in the craft community or world of illustration in some way and I guess I'm just wondering what's in the water there? Or is it just a coincidence? At this point in your life is RISD even a factor to you or just part of your bio?

I loved every minute of RISD, it is a small school and Providence is a small city. Most students lived in off-campus housing, and as a result that connected us all more to the city. All of my closest friends are still my friends from school, RISD really brings together a great community and a great group of people. And Providence has super cheap rent!

The Unbearable Absence of Garfield

2008-03-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

Another tip from Russell Etchen, Garfield Minus Garfield photoshops out the titular character in the series and leaves its human protagonist in an existential, schizoid crisis. As any cat person can attest, this is not too far to fall. This interpretation would have been helpful when casting the movie - Breckin Meyer as Jon Arbuckle misses the desperation that would have been great for Jeff Goldblum to take it to in terms of neurotic physical comedy.
What is it with Garfield as this generational icon? I don't know what he represents to Generation Y other than sloth and solipsism, or as just a stand in for '80s nostalgia. He is all over the PaperRad DVD on Load, and I have seen semi-ironic love for Garfield on oversized Tshirts in Portland and in the Bay. As a youth, Garfield was one character that i loved to draw because he fit such an easy formula of repetitive circles. If forced to draw something spontaneously on the spot, the pattern for early '80s Garfield is hardwired into my neurons and unfurls through my hand with less thought than my written Chinese name.

SeriPop tshirts for Zum

2008-03-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

Montreal's design and silkscreen posse SeriPop were kind enough to design this Tshirt for some illicit objects (records okay?). We met Chloe and Yannick when they came to Oakland with their band AIDS Wolf, who rule.
US / Canadian relations have been tense of late - SF's own NRSZ got held up at the border for some reason unknown to me, but we can bridge the friendship border with some of youse out there purchasing this Can/American collaborative Tshirt, printed by Emeryville-based YesPress.
This is also a promotion for the label that Yvonne and I started, Zum. We have done a few shirts in the past but this is the most elaborate design so far!
These are available in the Valencia Street store, along with a few of the super limited (only eight!) American Apparel tote bags pictured here, sans the Ben Grimm color scheme. The shirts are printed on mint Fruit of the Loom cotton.

back from SXSW

2008-03-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

I find myself sick upon returning from Austin. After a long layover in Las Vegas, talking to a girl freaking out that her medication is swelling up her ankles. It's a mirror to taking the red eye from Oakland to Houston, where a woman on the plane starts swearing and moaning in pain, saying her eyeballs are going to pop out of her head from the pressure (much as I picture Arnold Schwarzeneggar in Total Recall looking like a squeeze toy). So I caught something, surely, if not just a psychosomatic hypochondria from these drama queens of the skies. A cough that moved its way all around my head systems so now my eyes are overproducing their eye fluids. Sorry for the imagery.
Was it worth it? I actually found this SXSW, my third, to be the most enjoyable. Perhaps because I was not constrained by job obligations this time around, the pace seemed easier. Nothing blew me away but then again I was happy to have my expectations low and met.

When I first arrived Thursday morning, I took the bus to meet up with my friend Russell, who is starting up the Austin extension of his Houston bookstore Domy. We run into each other at APE sometimes. Russell used to book shows in Houston, but he's happily given up the music game to concentrate on running the store and gallery. It's a pretty raw space right now, but he was talking about a possible Gary Panter signing. Seems like Austin is ripe for this idea, no one is doing quite what they are doing. It's also in an old liquor store across the street from a soup kitchen and a block away from a methadone clinic.

After getting some food with Domy's owner Dan, we ended up at Mrs. Bea's outdoor Todd P party. I saw the much-discussed and thankfully lived-up-to-its-hype Ponytail from the excessively-hyped Baltimore music scene.

The guitarist used to play in Ecstatic Sunshine and I had seen the drummer before when he toured with Ultimate Reality. I could barely hear the singer and she was standing comically distanced from the rest of the band. They tore it up though. Ecstatic Sunshine played immediately after and were drastically different than last year when they were just duelling electric guitars. This time around it was just the red-haired guitarist with two accompanying noise makers crouching low, one of whom was hitting a drum pad. Gowns were next and they brought along Yasi for the trip which was a pleasant surprise. Yasi and I are in a band called Walt Disney with a rotating cast of random Bay Area people, mostly Tomo (Tussle), Cora (Tarpita Fleisch), Jorge Boehringer (Core of the Coalman), and Steve Santa Maria. It was nice in the first five minutes or so of arriving at Mrs. Bea's to see familiar faces from all over like Jessica Espeleta, Jim Smith, Fred Thomas, Karen and Todd, and the Meneguar dudes...
The rest of my time will be described on my new blog, entitled Californiageddon in honor of New Bad Things...

the Jeremy Tinder journal is here!

2008-03-18T17:15:00.001-07:00

We just got our first box of journals today and they turned out awesome!

LO artists at SXSW

2008-03-12T12:50:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but seems like everyone and their brother's going to SXSW this week! Or maybe it's just because my brother is going. My brother George of the dashboard postcard also has his hands in many pots. He's playing with his band KIT at several shows, hosting a party for his PR company Higher Publicity, and promoting the new release by Scary Mansion on his label zum. Look for the busy Chinese guy with glasses and say hi!

You can also meet up with and purchase some great posters from LO artists Dan Black & Jessica Seamans (Landland) and Jason Munn (The Small Stakes) at Flatstock. We actually just got a nice batch of Dan's posters in the mail today! His work is awesome and we are super excited to be collaborating with him on volume 3 of the LO Annual weekly planner!

we heart Landland's posters

a new project with Jeremy Tinder!

2008-03-05T15:21:00.000-08:00

Our new journal with art from the funny and talented Jeremy Tinder is in the process of being bound this week by our friends at 1984 in Oakland. Here's a sneak peek at the cover layout...

We'll let you know as soon as we get our sweaty little hands on them! And on the nice mail tip, Jeremy sent us this awesome paper cut-out thank you. We especially dig the graph paper hair. Thanks Jeremy!

Check out Jeremy's solo show this month at Chicago's rotofugi. "Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Banana?" features 200(!) paintings which you can check out online if you're not in town.

Asthmatic Kitty interview

2008-02-27T09:32:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Sara for thinking of us for the Asthmatic Kitty Records sidebar interview! We're always pretty self-conscious about these types of things, but Sara did a great job and we're excited that it's up, so here you go...

Exclusive Bookmark for The Tour Diary

2008-02-20T15:06:00.000-08:00

Check out the bookmark Allison Cole made for The Tour Diary that we sell exclusively at the LO Storefront in SF and on our online shop.

Joey Sayers at the Cartoon Art Museum

2008-02-13T13:28:00.000-08:00

Through May 4th the Cartoon Art Museum's ongoing Small Press Spotlight will feature the art of Joey Sayers. If you live in San Francisco or are just visiting, take the time to go to the Cartoon Art Museum and check out Joey's art in person!

Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
415-227-8666

http://www.cartoonart.org/

props to the button

2008-02-06T16:55:00.000-08:00

We got a pleasant surprise today when we saw a nice mention of one of the exclusive buttons that Alexa designed and printed and pressed for us on Design*Sponge. Thanks!

mail goodies

2008-02-01T18:10:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Eun-Ha for this awesome gift! It's a 3-D rendition of one of her images from the Milky Elephant postcard calendar and it makes me want to go snorkeling. Instead I have to settle for backyard birdwatching through the rain, but this keeps me dreaming.

We also got a nice funny piece of mail from Lart while she was visiting New York. Can't show you the contents, 'cause you know, it's personal, but here's a glimpse of the packaging...

Joey Sayers on cover of the Portland Mercury

2008-01-15T23:55:00.000-08:00

Joey Sayers, author of Teen Power, had a comic featured on the cover of the Portland Mercury a few weeks ago. She also has a weekly comic in the Mercury for those of you living in Portland and wanting to see it in print (you can also see a new weekly comic on her website, www.jsayers.com). Congrats Joey!

The Blog is Back!

2008-01-14T16:13:00.001-08:00

online shopping news

2007-11-27T01:00:00.001-08:00

Hey there! Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving and didn't stuff yourselves quite as badly as we did. It's fun to make tons of food, but you start to realize maybe it wasn't such a good idea when you find yourself bloated on starchy goodness. Anyhow, we obviously made it to Portland in one piece, but we're still settling in and working out the kinks and getting used to the colder weather. We've been in the process of switching over to a new shopping system as we've found that there are more features that we'd like to offer our online shoppers. The final blow came last weekend when the shipping function went haywire. It lit a fire to get the new site up and running, so while we still need to gussy it up, we are happy to present a new working shopping site at www.littleotsu.com! We haven't completely dismantled the old one yet (as you may know if you're reading this), but we're transitioning. Sorry for any confusion, but we're glad to say we can now accommodate Canadian orders again, along with many other countries. So please visit the new site for all your LO ordering needs, not to mention our brand new Annual Vol. 2 Planner and Tour Diary!

hello Portland, hello Kirk

2007-10-29T09:23:00.001-07:00

It is with a tinge of sadness but a lot of excitement that we're moving our publishing headquarters (and home) from SF to Portland. After many years of flirting with the idea, we are finally heading north. We look forward to being able to better devote our time to making bigger and better projects and finding new artists to collaborate with. While we'll miss the daily interactions with customers in the store, we will still be filling online orders and handling all LO-related correspondence. But don't fret, we're keeping our San Francisco storefront open with the help of a lovely fellow known as Kirk. He's a recent transplant from Minnesota and super nice, so feel free to stop by and welcome him to the neighborhood.

We look forward to coming back often for the store, for our printers, and friends and family so we won't say any big goodbyes. We will however apologize to anyone waiting on orders as we're out of commission until the end of the week. Ok, back to packing!

Come Along!

2007-10-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

After much work, re-work, and anticipation, we are stoked to finally have Lart's new Come Along weekly planner in hand! Lart used color pencil to hand-draw every aspect of the planner, most impressively over 64 feet of landscape! Every week is a new part of the journey. Come along!

We turned 5!

2007-10-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

We opened our storefront 5 years ago today! Thanks so much to everybody who's been a part of our store in any way. Oh, and it's also Lart's birthday today too, so happy birthday to Lart!

hopping along, singing a song

2007-09-11T14:39:00.000-07:00

Considering I've been confined to crutches the last two weeks, I should have written something much sooner, but lack of mobility has not meant lack of things to do. But to explain... I was coming back inside to the Pool tradeshow on the afternoon of the first day and turned back to hold open the door and say hello to the person behind me who had stopped at our booth earlier while I had been on the phone. I guess I was still moving forward while not looking where I was stepping and next thing I knew, I was on the floor. After a few minutes, I was able to hobble back to our booth and what seemed like a bad sprain was confirmed as a fractured ankle the next day at the ER in Henderson. Well, seems like everyone has their injury stories and mine is pretty boring and benign, but it's my first broken bone. Suffice it to say, the rest of my week in Vegas was shot (no donuts, or much else, for me), but I did manage to make it through dinner for my grandpa's 85th birthday. Many thanks to Heidi & Angela from McSweeney's, my grandma, and mom for helping me get through the week away from home. Coming back to SF and a 3rd floor walk-up was not much fun, but all in all, it hasn't been too painful of an experience, just incredibly inconvenient and more fraught with accident potential than usual.

At any rate, I got a walking cast this morning, so now comes the more difficult part of putting weight on it again. It hasn't been very pleasant so far, so I'm taking this lounging opportunity to write this quick update. My accident couldn't have come at a worse time as we are swamped! We released Keri Smith's Non-Planner Datebook just a few days before I left for Vegas and the orders came pouring in! So our apologies to everyone who's had to wait a few extra days on their order--we're a woman down and Jeremy's working his hardest to fill all the orders and keep the store running. And besides those new bookmarks (by Lart, Simon Evans, and Scott Barry) and Lart's 3-year calendar and artist print that I mentioned last time, we have 2 new cards from Lart and 2 from Berkeley's Evah Fan! We also used the margin space from those cards to print a picture I took and a drawing from my brother George which I colored--we'll add those to the site in a few days. And we hit a snag with Lart's Come Along planner, but it's back on track and along with the LO Annual V.2, should be out in a few weeks. And late but not least, our travel planner with Allison Cole should be ready to turn in soon. We have more projects in the works, but I'll save that for a later time. Back to recuperating!

John Porcellino's 2008 Calendar is here!

2007-08-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

We got in John Porcellino's Through the Year with Gordon The Fox 2008 Calendar & Mini Book last week and they look amazing! Just thought I would put up a couple of photos.

calendar mania

2007-08-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

Cindy from Favorite just delivered the bulk of Eun-Ha's 2008 Milky Elephant Postcard Calendar and we are super excited about them! The full-color is awesome and everything looks amazing. The postcards really tear out and the binding works, which is such a relief because you never quite know for sure when you're thinking of things theoretically. Eun-Ha did such a great job with it that I just wanted to preserve it as a book so it was hard to bring myself to tear a page out, but I had to make sure it worked and it was made to be used, so I just kind of had to remind myself of that. Luckily we have the liberty (i.e., inventory) that will allow me to save one and use one. Hooray for being the publisher!

Cindy also dropped off sample pages of John P's 2008 Gordon the Fox calendar (which is on its way to get spiral bound and will hopefully be ready at the beginning of next week) which was quite a thrill in itself. It's going to be a fun calendar and mini-book (we designed it so that you cut off the dates once the year is over to have a little "book" of Gordon going through the year) and I'm pretty stoked with the way the colors came out (not to pat my own back--although they do look pretty nice--but more like "phew! I didn't mess it up!"). At any rate, the pages looked really good and we can't wait to have it bound and in-hand.

On top of our four fabulous 2008 calendars, we're going to be adding one more to the mix. Well, it's a bit different. Lart drew the reference calendars for 2008-2010 for her Come Along planner (which will be done soon!) three times, which is a crazy crazy amount of work! She showed me one of the unused ones on our subway ride in from JFK and it was so cool that it would have been a waste not to do something with it. Jeremy concurred once we got back to SF and so the plan to print it was set in motion. Of course there are always snags and it had to be rescanned when Lart got back to Berlin, but it's finally ready to go to the printer. It's going to be like a small poster of color pencil extravaganza that will be great for an office or desk. We're also making some new bookmarks by Lart, Simon Evans, and Scott Barry, as well as our first artist print in celebration of LO50 (wow, can't believe we've made so much stuff already!), which is an amazingly detailed drawing by Lart. You will be awestruck by what she has done with a Micron. Insanity.

Speaking of insanity, I'll be going to another trade show at the end of the month. But it's going to be ten times more fun than the Stationery Show (besides Lart not being there and the joy that is Manhattan vegan eats) because we'll be sharing a booth with our pals from McSweeney's! So come visit us at booth A510 at Pool, August 27th-29th. Let me know if you have any food tips for me in Las Vegas/Henderson. I hear there are vegan Boston cream donuts...

On a non-work note, I must mention that we are so happy that one of the greatest tv shows ever, Twitch City, is now on DVD. Even though the quality of the images and the extras are lacking and Mark McKinney is not nearly as good as Bruce McCulloch in the role of Rex Reilly, Twitch City is still a remarkable show that you must see if you have any sense of humor. We heart Don McKellar. And hey, even though the late night shows have been saturated by promotion for it, Superbad still looks awesome.

project updates

2007-07-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

It's been a little while since we've posted, but thankfully it's because we have so much going on! I just picked up our great new grid notebook that we worked on with Jason Munn (see pg 108 of the June issue of Metropolis--it's all about him!) and some silly little notepads I drew from our friends at 1984 in Oakland. Very exciting to finally have those in hand. In the meantime though, we've been working like crazy getting a new batch of projects ready to turn in.

Lart kicked ass when she got back to Berlin and did an amazing job wrapping up her Come Along planner. It's hard to work with someone half a day away from you, but she was a champ and stayed up late many nights just to talk to us and get it done. Martine's been kicking down some extra work time too to finish up the Annual Vol. 2. She's added lots of little touches like scanning in security envelope patterns to use for borders and making small tree drawings to use in distinguishing the months. It will be the "cleanest" planner we've ever made, but still has our personalities poking through. Jeremy and I came up with a whole new batch of questions for every week, often crossing the line between thought-provoking and stupid. Hey, they're supposed to be fun right?

Last week we turned in Eun-Ha's Milky Elephant 2008 Postcard of the Month calendar to our friend Cindy at Favorite Printing and the pages are drying as we speak! It still has a ways to go before it will be done as it's the most complex binding job we've ever come up with. The pages need to be perforated twice, the cover needs to be drilled and scored in three places, and then the whole thing has to be stapled and glued. yowzer. It's a lot of work, but it's totally going to be worth it. We can't wait to see how it turns out!

proofs for Eun-Ha's calendar

On top of all that, I've been working with John Porcellino on coloring his Little Otsu 2008 calendar and mini-book, Through the Year with Gordon the Fox. We're so used to seeing John P's work for King-Cat in black and white--it's part of the simplicity that makes his work so moving--but we were inspired to do a full-color calendar with him because of the cover that he did for the Comics Journal a few years back. It was a lovely seasonal scene and it got us thinking that it would be great to have a whole year of such things. We've admired John's work for a long long time and got to know him during his stint in SF, and it's an honor to be working on this with him. I've done a lot of editing and cleaning on our projects, but I've never done anything like this before so I was looking forward to the challenge. It's been a pretty smooth process so far, although it has definitely pushed my limits as far as thinking in color. But John's been a great help and very encouraging. I think the end result is going to be great.

sneak peek at one of the month's with Gordon the Fox

Anyhow, I need to finish doing some revisions on a couple months today and we're finalizing the layout for Keri Smith's Non-planner Datebook. We got some much needed help from Kristine in putting it together and just have some minor details to take care of before wrapping it up and hopefully turning it in tomorrow. Did I mention we've been busy?

annual planner #2

2007-06-16T00:06:00.001-07:00

After a little hiatus I am back, working full force on the Annual Planner #2! This time around we're featuring illustrations of buildings. Drawing buildings is like fitting puzzle pieces together or playing tetris. I don't like to sketch it out with pencil first, I start with one side of the building and work my way to the other side and try to make all the windows, details and doors fit together . It's fun!
Here is a drawing that is almost finished:

I need to add some windows, some shingle shadows and other things then clean it up with whiteout.

And here is a drawing that didn't really turn out because I wasn't concentrating and was watching tv: