Our old pal & LO artist Martine Workman is going to be at the Brooklyn Zine Fest in Williamsburg this weekend with her new cards and Water and Fall mini book that she made for us, her newspaper project The Methow Mill, Prince Food (her zine about food in Prince songs), and the perennial favorite Hunks, among other goodies. Admission is free and open to the public so go meet some great artists and writers!

You can read an interview the Zine Fest did with Martine and there is also an article about the Fest in the New York Times.

Brooklyn Zine Fest 2013
Sunday, April 21st 11am-6pm
Public Assembly
70 N 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY
FREE, all ages & open to everyone

The awesome UK graphic arts festival Pick Me Up starts this Thursday at Somerset House in London and provides the perfect opportunity to finally share one of our big projects with you! One of the international rising stars of the graphics arts world specially selected by an industry panel to be featured in the Pick Me Up Selects artist showcase is Daniel Frost and we’re thrilled to announce that he’s working on a children’s book with us!

The picture book takes place in his wonderful fictional town of Frostville–it’s a charming place populated with colorful characters and humorous city life. We love Daniel’s elongated figures, use of bold colors, expressive simplicity, and sense of the comical.  It’s been fun working with him on developing the book and we’re super excited with how it’s coming along. It won’t be released until the fall and we’ll be posting updates, but you can get sneak peaks of process and ideas on Daniel’s blog and if you’re in London, you can meet him and see his work-in-progress at Pick Me Up!

Pick Me Up (London, UK)
April 18th-28th, 2013
Somerset House, Embankment Galleries
Daily 10am-6pm (Last admission 5:15pm)
Thursdays 10am-10pm (Last admission 11:15pm)
£8, concessions £6, Festival Pass £15 (buy tickets online)

San Francisco artist Jennie Smith (who recently created two great cards for us as well as several amazing poster calendars) has a new art show called “Sending Out A Song” opening this Thursday at the Rena Bransten Gallery. Jennie is an incredibly talented artist and her work is the kind that must be seen in-person (and if you go to the opening you can meet Jennie herself!). Here is the description of her show from Rena Bransten’s site:

Jennie Smith’s delicate graphite drawings and watercolors continue to express her concern with specific ecological issues, such as the floating continent of plastic debris known as the great Pacific Garbage Patch, the migration of indigenous people, and the ecosystems of small, vulnerable animals. Equally enchanted by natural phenomena – wind, animal habitat, whale songs – and the creative, mythical, and crafted remnants of the human world, Smith responds with metaphorical renderings that entwine narrative threads to describe the gravity or wonder of her subjects and their relationships to the forces of nature. She says, “I draw what is close to me, what is beyond my physical reach, and what is from the realm of the imagined.”

Jennie Smith
Sending Out a Song
March 21 – May 4, 2013
Reception: Thursday, March 21, 5:30-7:30pm

Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street (between Kearny and Grant)
San Francisco, CA 94108
(415) 982-3292

 image from Rena Bransten Gallery

Hey Seattle, the Urban Craft Uprising huge winter craft show is this weekend (December 1st-2nd) and not only are we going to be there with lots of LO goods, we helped facilitate this year’s show poster/t-shirt art by our good friend, LO artist, and former Seattleite Martine Workman! Martine won’t be able to make it out from D.C., but we’ll have her awesome zines and mini newspapers available for sale. So come out and see us (booth 58) at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall from 11am-5pm. It’s free to get in, the first 100 people in line each day get a free swag bag, and there are free raffle drawings, craft demos, and book signings each hour. What a great way to shop for the holidays!

Urban Craft Uprising
Seattle Center Exhibition Hall
321 Mercer Street
December 1st-2nd, 11am-5pm
admission is free

Chicago has always been a hotspot for indie comics so you know that the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) is going to be good! It debuts this weekend at Columbia College and there are comics for sale, workshops, exhibitions, panel discussions, and more. Meet lots of comics luminaries in-person including LO artists Jo Dery, Lilli Carré, Jeremy Tinder, and John Porcellino. The event is free so no reason not to go!

CAKE
June 16 & 17, 2012, 11am-6pm
Columbia College’s Ludington Building
1104 S Wabash, 8th floor, Chicago
free and open to the public

CAKE poster by Laura Park

Simon Evans, husband and collaborator of our old friend Lart C. Berliner, is having a solo show this summer at Mudam Luxembourg called, “How To Be Alone When You Live With Someone“. Simon and Lart will be there for the opening and the show looks fantastic so if you’re in the area, you should stop by and check it out!

From the museum’s website:
“The graphic compositions by the British artist Simon Evans combine drawings with fragments of words and relate to diaries, automatic writing, collage, lists, inventories, encyclopedias, diagrams, cartography, cosmology… The exhibition at Mudam will involve the production of new pieces.”

Mudam Luxembourg
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
3, Park Dräi Eechelen
L-1499 Luxembourg
t +352 45 37 85 1

Simon Evans: How To Be Alone When You Live With Someone
June 2 – September 23, 2012

Simon Evans : Vocabulary, 2011 © The Artist / Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York / Shanghai

George here (Yvonne’s brother). I have been doing a music podcast for a while but this is the first full-on interview I’ve done. Nate Denver has illustrated and written books for La Mano and we go way back in the San Francisco music scene as well. He just completed a kickstarter project for his next illustrated book/cd “Haunted Armor”, so I thought it was as good a time as any to catch up with him!

a page from "Wait, You're Not A Centaur" by Nate Denver

Jo Dery is part of the 2012 deCordova Biennial that opened on January 21st at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. She has an installation on the fourth floor in the DeNormandie Library which includes a HD video projection, as well as three circular books and a set of wooden dice. You can read more about the making of the installation on her blog.

Jo working on wooden dice (photo by Alex Dunbar)

We are excited to be participating in the inaugural Short Run small press fest this Saturday in Seattle! LO artist and good pal Martine Workman helped launch this event with her co-coordinators and it looks like it’s going to be a ton of fun with lots of artists and publishers from the Northwest!

Saturday, November 12th, 10:30am-4:30pm
The Vera Project at the Seattle Center (corner of Warren & Republican Ave N)
free to the public

There’s also an after party & art show at the Fantagraphics Bookstore (1201 S Vale Street) from 6-9pm.

Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation 2011 Poster Trailer from Eyeworks Festival on Vimeo.

Lucky Chicago! Lilli Carré and Alexander Stewart have organized another Eyeworks Animation Festival for this weekend! Here is the lowdown from their website:

Eyeworks is a festival focusing on abstract animation and unconventional character animation. Festival programs showcase outstanding experimental animation of all sorts: classic films, new works and rare masterpieces.

The Eyeworks programs showcase a range of animation techniques, including paper cutouts, stop-motion, 3D computer animation, and a wide variety of hand-drawn methods. The content of the films is even more varied, and includes cosmic abstraction, psychedelic characters, geometric patterning, and surrealistic narratives.

Eyeworks celebrates animated moving images that express unusual vision, unusual approaches, and unusual style.

November 5 & 6, 2011
DePaul CDM Theater, 247 S. State Street, basement level
Jackson stop, Red Line
Chicago, USA