Not Actual PDX colours

A few little moleskine sketches of downtown Portland. Brush pens, as usual. I guess I did these in January? I haven't drawn much like this lately, and I really ought. I enjoy it.

Actually, I need a new sketchbook. My current one has got to the point where I'm squeezing notes and drawings into little leftover spaces. I was going to make me a new sketchbook myself, but I don't know if I have time, I guess I'll just buy a new one... Sorry, this all got a bit stream of consciousness. I'll keep the rest of my mundanities to myself.







You know, I like having these drawings as a record of where I've been, what I've done. (Usually what coffee shop I've been to, let's face it.) The best kind of diary for me.

So Excited I Might Throw Up

Hey, guess what is happening this weekend?!

It's the annual Stumptown Comics Fest!

I have never been able to go before - never been in Portland at the right time - so this will be my first visit, and I must say I am very excited. (Not vomit excited, I was exaggerating for the post title.) Many of my favourite comics artists will be there, including Lucy Knisley and Erika Moen and Kate Beaton, and many more who I don't yet know. I have a weird feeling of being overwhelmed with celebrity, already. Clearly, I need someone who will prevent me from babbling like a weirdo if I accidentally converse with an artist. Sophie, you gonna help me out? Nope, I remember when we met Erika Moen at the last PDX comics event. I waffled, it was terrible, we had to leave quickly.

A Few Life Notes

Went to see Tegan & Sara play in town. They were amazing! It was a purely enjoyable concert, and the fact that all of the lesbians in Portland were there didn't hurt either. The venue was seated, which I am not used to, but I discovered that all that means is that you can sit and chill when the support is playing, and then move to the front and stand for the main act. This is the second time I have seen Tegan & Sara. The first time I saw them was a few years ago at the Cockpit in Leeds (yes, it's really called the Cockpit). I went with my friends Nick and Cat, and I neglected to tell each of them where we were going, who the band were, and the fact that the other person was coming. My friends put up with a lot of misinformation.

Had some crescent rolls the other night - they are weird. For those who do not know what crescent rolls are, they are a bastardised American version of croissants, they come in a tube, you twist the tube around the middle and the dough bursts out in a disturbing fashion, and then the dough is pre-cut into rolled up triangles, which you roll into a semblance of a croissant. See, WEIRD. But good. Mmm, fake buttery dough.

I've been drinking a lot of Sessions lager lately. It is cheap, and tastes better than PBR. Sorry, I appreciate PBR for a lot of reasons, but taste is not necessarily one of them.



I am working on a new zine! Well, I keep telling people that, but I haven't actually done any work on it myself. But our fine contributors have been sending in articles. So they have done some work. It's going to be sweet though, just you wait.

Did you ever play MASH when in High School? Not sure I can remember back that far, but ANYWAY, we played it last week and here are my results: I am married to Queen Victoria, my car is an aircraft carrier, I have 5,280 kids, my pets are hookworms, my occupation is space cowboy, I live in The Shire, and my major vice is an unfulfillable centaur porn fetish.

My First Screenprint

Check it out, this morning I made my first ever batch of screenprints!

The technique used involves painting screen filler over the screen in a negative of the image you'd like to print. i.e. you paint in the white spaces. The screen filler blocks off the tiny holes in the mesh of your screen, so when you push ink through it, it only goes through the spaces you haven't filled in - the black spaces. Simple, ha?

The actual process of screenprinting is surprisingly quick and straightforward. You use a squeegee style thing to push a thin layer of ink onto the reverse side of the screen, with your substrate (whatever you are printing onto) receiving the design underneath. I am not sure how easy that is to visualise without pictures, but trust that it's pretty easy to grasp once you start doing it. Takes a bit of effort to do, I guess - I am just increasing the awesomeness of my printmaking forearms. Please apply at the box office for tickets to the gun show, ladies.

Here is the original drawing I based my print on. I adapted it from a photo of an etching press I found in an old printmaking handbook. It's reversed in the print, of course.




Then of course the neat thing about screenprinting is that you can print easily on all kinds of materials. Today's fabric prints didn't turn out too well, but the ones on paper worked. I did about 25 altogether this morning.







P.S. Do you get it, it's a picture of an etching press but it's a screenprint. Ironical!!

Boozin' (is Pretty)

I took this picture the other night while I was out with some pals at Dots, a local favourite bar. They do excellent cocktails, they have fuzzy velvet wallpaper, cool bar staff (my fave reminds my of Joni Mitchell), kitchy artwork, hipsters. You know, Portland stuff. And they do the best sloe gin fizz I have tasted. On this particular occasion I drank too much whisky with beer chaser and got wasty-faced, but oh well.




I have recovered my hangover now, who wants to go back to Dots??

Snapshots of PDX

A series of relief prints I made recently showing little views of Portland. No landmarks or anything, just houses and street furniture. I had great fun with these, playing with angles and textures and composition.