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).

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)

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

All the hubbub yesterday about funding the Veronica Mars movie made us think that we should make a plug for the effort to restore and digitize the classic French movie musical by Jacques Demy, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It’s the 50th anniversary of the film this year and Demy’s family (lead by the awesome director Agnès Varda) is trying to raise a modest 25k Euros to finish paying for the process of restoring it to its original splendor for a debut screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May (and for all posterity). If you’ve never seen the movie, it’s full of colors, awesome wallpapers, a 20-year old Catherine Deneuve in her first major role, sung dialog all the way through (it totally works), the realities of young love, the town of Cherbourg, lots of great shots, and a main song that will be stuck in your head for weeks. Watch it regardless, but you have 32 days to help them meet their goal and keep one of the best movies alive for years to come.

Film Diary: Krylya, 1966, directed by Larisa Shepitko

Russian director Larisa Shepitko’s career was cut way too short when she was killed in a car accident at age 41, but thankfully we have access to her two major works through Criterion’s Eclipse Series. Wings is her first feature after graduating from the All-Russian State Institute for Cinematography and it is already a mature, quietly stunning film. The combination of a memorable performance by Maya Bulgakova as the main character, universally human moments, and beautiful compositions makes this film stand its ground with its contemporaries and mourn for all that could have been for this remarkable director. I highly recommend both Wings and The Ascent.

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.

1976 Vietnam

It didn’t occur to me how difficult it would be to pin down some information on the stamp. Searching the text brought up lots of Vietnamese language pages which wasn’t too helpful. Finally I pinned down this page and translated it to find that this seems to be half of a stamp set issued in 1976 marking the re-unification of the country. According to this Wikipedia page about the postal history of Vietnam, these must have been issued in July/August as it still has the name of the North Vietnamese state printed on them (the text along the top). The whole page is an interesting read as you consider that stamps were originally issued there in 1862 under French colonial rule and then there was a Northern and Southern state. Anyhow, that’s a lot of history for a 12-cents stamp!

US Orders:
USPS First Class Mail or UPS Ground: order by Monday the 17th
USPS Priority Mail or UPS Three-Day Select: order by Wednesday the 19th
UPS 2nd Day Air: order by Thursday the 20th
UPS Next Day Air Saver: order by Friday the 21st
USPS Express Mail: order by Saturday the 22nd

If you choose Free Shipping it is unlikely that it will arrive on time.

Crafty Wonderland Super Colossal Holiday Sale
Oregon Convention Center, Hall C (we’re at booth 23)
777 NE MLK Jr. Blvd, Portland, OR 97232
December 8th-9th, 11am-6pm
free admission

The Portland Bazaar
Sandbox Studio, 420 NE 9th Ave, Portland, OR 97232
December 8th 9am-5pm, December 9th 9am-4pm
free admission