There is still time to order a gift or card for Mother’s Day! We have a new frameable print of Becca Stadtlander’s Flowers Card image and a fantastic new Happy Mother’s Day Card by Martine Workman! Place your order by tomorrow (May 8th) and ship via USPS Priority Mail for delivery by Saturday (US only).

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)

After 7 years of making cards, we’re finally taking the big leap into specific holidays! We’re kicking things off with this upcoming season’s popular slogan of  “moms, dads, and grads” with new artwork by our good pal Martine Workman. While the cards are off at the printer, we thought we’d give you a preview of our Mother’s Day card and a peek at the process.

Martine started sketching out her ideas during her residency at VCCA and we zeroed in on this drawing in particular as we felt we hadn’t seen anything like it before as far as Mother’s Day cards go (or otherwise). “Fancy string” made us think of bakers twine and the typography was just something unusual. As you can see, it started out as a very rough idea, so the next step was for her to draw and ink the lettering and try out some colors.

Next she added the detail to the string and cleaned up the drawing. Harking back again to bakers twine, we thought blue and green would make for a nice combo–it’s feminine without using the typical pink. The standard red, while most familiar, was a bit too candy cane/Christmasy for the occasion. The lettering looked great, but felt too stark on just white so she played with lots of combos for the background, pumping up the color for the lettering so it wouldn’t get lost in the mix.

There were a lot of great options, but in the end, we both had a gut response to one version as being the one, and thus our new card was born! We can’t wait to have the final printed product in our hands in a couple weeks so we can share it with you and the moms in your life.

We’re excited to bring you two new cards from our long-time collaborator, SF artist Jennie Smith! Jennie has brought her love of nature to these hand-drawn cards spilling over with plant life. Through her mediums of graphite and water color, her unique hand gives you a great way to send a Birthday message or Holiday greeting. Both cards are printed in Oakland, CA on 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. They’re available in our online shop now and at our SF Mini Store at the end of the week!

We had a great time working with fellow Portlanders APAK on their Space Garden calendar last year so making a new calendar for 2013 came naturally. We’re now pleased to present the results! The theme this time is “Simple Life” and you’ll find colorful scenes of life among the trees, from sleeping in a hammock to gardening, picnicking to making music. It’s a happy companion to the year and a reminder to enjoy every day! It’s available now in our online shop and at our SF Mini Store with wider release coming soon.

We are so excited to introduce our newest Annual Weekly Planner to you! We were able to team up again with the lovely Lizzy Stewart to bring you 12 months and 54 weeks filled with her charmingly rendered objects, landscapes, buildings, and fauna. You can pre-order the planner which will ship around July 27th, but if you act fast, we have a handful (11!) copies to ship now, first-ordered first-filled. There will also be a few copies at our SF mini store on Friday. Be one of the first to get one!

Our latest batch of ten new cards is just about ready to make its official entrance at our online shop and SF mini store, but we thought we’d make another introduction in the meantime. We loved working with UK artist Hannah Waldron on her Living Things installment and wanted to do more projects with her, but she was taking a break from print to focus on her weaving. The good news is that we got to collaborate on this wonderful new botanical garden-inspired card before she got accepted to Konstfack in Sweden for a textile masters program which she’s now preparing for. The resulting work is a colorful scene full of plants and birds and greenhouses and gardens. We love how she breaks down forms into simple shapes that coalesce into complex wholes and can’t wait for our next chance to work together!

Here’s another page from Jessica Seamans’ forthcoming Living Things–hint: it’s a kelpie!

We are so excited about our next book in the Living Things Series that we wanted to give you a peek! Jessica Seamans has totally outdone herself with her theme of “A Brief Sampling of Cryptids, Folkloric Beasts & Mythological Animals” and we can’t wait until we get them back from the printer in a few weeks. In the meantime, check out the amazing centerfold!

Hope you all had happy holidays and a merry new year! We were so busy that we didn’t get a chance to properly introduce you to our two latest releases… Becca Stadtlander’s Night Home and Liam Stevens’ installment in the Living Things Series, Amazon.

Becca liked working on her Living Things Vol 6 so much that she was inspired to make another mini book of drawings, this time all about the night, and asked us if we would like to publish it. Naturally we said yes and lo and behold, the lovely Night Home! It has a beautiful wintery wrap-around painting on the cover and inside you’ll find an array of nocturnal inkwash images that create an enigmatic atmosphere from a forgotten time.

London-based Liam Stevens brings a whole new level of artistry to the Living Things Series with his amazing contribution! He chose the Amazon as his theme and constructed multiple paper-cut dioramas of lush jungle and river life. Climbing monkeys, schools of fish, and vine-laden trees get an extra dimension in Liam’s playful style, but are just as charming in their contrasting 2-D arrangements. This is a work of great detail that deserves to be examined and re-examined to appreciate all of its nuances.