This is my third year creating the promotional poster for the Marigold Project’s Día de los Muertos festival that takes place in Garfield Park in San Francisco every November 2nd.
The posters have just gone to press, and should soon be making an appearance in the Mission neighborhoods!
Last Saturday I went down to Monterey with a couple of my friends for a whale watching tour out on the bay. It was my first time on a boat that wasn’t a commuter ferry, so experiencing the late afternoon waves and swells was exciting. It had been very warm in inland, but it got colder as we got farther out onto the water, mostly because the boat was moving at a fast clip and it was extremely windy. I had brought a snowboarding jacket with a fleece lining and a wool hat, and definitely needed them!
We didn’t see any whales (late summer isn’t an ideal time to spot them, and apparently this year there hadn’t been as many sighted in the bay anyway), but there were thousands of jellyfish just below the surface of the water. Most of them were sea nettles, which were a striking bright orange-yellow against the teal waters. It was kind of frightening to imagine that if our boat capsized or sank…we’d be in these cold waters literally swarming with large, stinging jellyfish. We saw a large pod of Risso’s dolphins out in the bay, and then a pod of bottlenose dolphins when we were returning to the pier. I’ve seen dolphins at aquariums before, but I had no idea how excited I’d be to see them out in the wild. I was gasping and shouting every time I spotted one. Another amazing sight back at the pier was a massive flock of shearwaters and gulls and pelicans, all gathering in a feeding frenzy.
Since we didn’t see any whales, we were given free tickets for another trip! I really just enjoyed the boat ride and being out on the water, so I’m definitely looking forward to doing it again.
I decided to paint a page in my travel journal for the whale watching trip – two hours away counts as travel!
It was a busy week for graphic design work, and progress continues on the Dia de los Muertos poster. Here’s a sketch that will be on the poster – a girl in calaca costume on a trapeze!
And I’ve finally updated my Etsy shop with prints of three ‘new’ art nouveau insects. The paintings were actually made a few years ago, but I hadn’t had an opportunity to have prints made of them and I sort of forgot about them! Now that I’m making my own prints, I’m trying to go through my hard drive(s) and see what forgotten and neglected art is lingering there.
I’m having a special sale on the three new insect prints through the end of October! Purchase any number of them and use the coupon code INSECT and I’ll take 10% off of your total order. OR if you order the full set of the other art nouveau insects I’ll include your choice of one of the new insect prints for free! Be sure to use the coupon code when you place your order!
I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate when I try to work at home. The internet isn’t even the worst distraction anymore. I have things I want to knit. My room needs to be cleaned. Books to be read. And honestly I’m just tired of of seeing this room sometimes. I spend entirely too much of my life cooped up in here. So lately I’ve been venturing out to cafes to work – beyond the local cafes, which are either too crowded or too familiar, and it’s helped me get some drawing done. So far my favorite is the Mercury Cafe in Hayes Valley. There’s nothing special about it, but I like the space, I enjoyed the music they played, and the vibe from the other patrons and the employees was welcoming and relaxing. I went on a Friday and had lunch and drew for a few hours, and then returned the next day with my friend Liza (whose amazing work is at http://stellarbaby.com/) and we chatted and sketched for several hours. (Part of the reason we stayed so long was that we were waiting for their freshly baked blueberry pie to be ready, but sadly we had to go before it was fully cooled. Next time, pie will be ours.)
Friday’s work was a preliminary sketch for this year’s Dia de los Muertos poster, which is a going to have a very Mission-centric theme. The past two years’ posters have both had decorative borders that looked like papel picado, and we wanted to keep that motif. This year, the background of the illustration is more complex than the foreground, so I decided that rather than use the papel picado as a border element, I’d let it be more of an integral part of the design.
It’s also a practical decision – we got started late on the poster design this year, and I only have 2 weeks for to complete the illustration, which just wouldn’t be enough time for a fully rendered background.
On Saturday I drew a sketch based on one of my photos from the drive from Santa Fe to Taos, and on Monday I tried another cafe (Cafe du Soleil. More of a restaurant than coffee shop. Tables too close together, friendly, but a little too busy. The music was too jazzy for my taste. The food was good, though.) and added the magpies and the girl to the foreground.
I haven’t drawn the rest of her legs or her right hand because I’m not sure yet what she’s sitting on and how she’s interacting with it. I’m leaning towards having her perched on an old wooden fence.
So this will be another New Mexico themed drawing. We saw a lot of magpies and sunflowers in Taos. Everywhere that a road sign was planted, huge clusters of sunflowers were growing alongside.
