new prints in my etsy shop!

just listed these three new prints onto my etsy shop :)

Map of My Life poetry chapbook

Map of My Life is 8 poems & 2 stories, it's about my favorite fruit. a childhood memory. living in san francisco and riding muni. it's about everyday things, it's exploring who i am.

i've been writing poems since i was thirteen, now i'm twenty, so it's long overdue i suppose on publishing my first collection of poems & there are two short stories as well. and i do mean really short stories. i took a short story class during the spring semester and every story i wrote was 500 words or less. but i don't mind that, because it's the words that matter.

sprinkled around the words are some photos i took while walking around the city. the skeleton piano photo is one i took when i toured the san francisco dump.

check it out in my etsy shop :)

vintage paper fair

i look forward to going to the vintage paper fair in san francisco, it comes three times a year now, for 2 days each in january, may and august.

i love digging through the $1 or less table. the typical stuff i find is usually old letters, a mishmash of old booklets, maps, and it's a place where people carefully sift though boxes and boxes of postcards in various themes. i don't collect anything that seems too precious, though i covet tiny french dictionaries and beautiful storybooks like frank baum's oz books and scrapbooks from the 1800s. there's so much eye candy but i go for the cheap stuff - the used vintage envelopes, old photos and letters, cabinet cards and cigar labels.



most of my 'finds' yesterday were old airmail envelopes. i love the handwriting and the dash of postmarks, the assortment of stamps and some of them came with letters. most of them didn't but the decorated envelopes were enough of a treasure.



some of them are so lovely, i'm not sure if i can tear them apart for my art, maybe i will frame a few of my favorites.

easter egg dyes

it's pretty obvious i am a paper junkie. every time i go to Flax, a local art store with an amazing selection of handmade papers, i never leave without at least a few sheets of handmade papers. i often get them on sale, for a dollar or two. but sometimes my papers just sit there and i don't use them much.

in the the current issue of somerset life spring 09, connie govea stuart has a beautiful article on a simple idea: dying ribbon and papers with easter egg dyes.

so i had a fun time dipping my handmade papers into the dyes. i dyed paper that had strings embedded in it, lace with beading, coffee filters and anything else i could get my hands on. i liked seeing how the colors varied depending on which kind of paper/surface was being dyed.



next year, i will definitely stock up on easter egg dyes after easter is over!

making art in cafes

a few weeks ago, i had a fun time meeting up with another atcsforall friend, Sunny. we both live in san francisco and i thought it would be fun to meet in a cafe and make some art. we ended up staying there for nearly 3 hours! and our table of course was the messiest one compared to everyone else's. they were doing homework or on their laptops. i don't think they were having as much fun as sunny and i were.

we both brought supplies, sunny shared her distress ink pads and pastels which were fun to use. i brought silky crayons and lots of magazine papers and other ephemera for us to play with. I loved seeing her art journal in person.

Making art outside my attic room is definitely interesting. i am often limited in terms of supplies, but being out of the studio sometimes makes me see the stuff i use in a different way, or i improvise. i use ONLY the things around me instead of shuffling the piles of papers in my room.



and making art with a new friend is great too because there's instant feedback and ideas. it's this back and forth thing as we encourage one another and if we're stuck i like that another person can see view the piece with a different perspective.

meeting up with dana

dana is a friend i met though atcsforall, which is the amazing website she owns and runs. i had a fantastic time with dana (adriayna) - we went to have lunch in chinatown, then it was onto Flax - an art store with a fabulous selection of decorative papers. you should have seen dana - she ended up buying a ton of papers, all of which were priced from $1-$2 a sheet. there were italian marble papers that were only a dollar, blue net papers, wrapping paper with blue hot air balloons, delicate silvery white papers. at one point dana had so many papers in her hands, they kept falling!


this is dana working on a page in my journal!


the beginnings of a collage i did in dana's journal.

then it was onto scrap! a warehouse full of junk companies and people donated that was great for all kinds of artists and crafters. because the bus was so late, we ended up getting there by 4:30 and had only half an hour to shop but i think we found some good things - i got some children's alphabet blocks, rubber stamps and some paper. dana got some amazing translucent paper that had been typewritten on, which gave lovely effects on the collages we did.


dana's watercolor pallette

we finally got to my place and made art for a few hours in my attic room. dana taught me the wonders of using vibrant bold shin han watercolors! how to layer colors on top of another, it was so fun to splatter the colors onto the page. i had always wondered about how to use watercolors and now i know how to do vibrant backgrounds...


i had an idea on doing collaborative artwork together, so we worked on two canvases and both came out really well. this is the one i kept and dana has the other one.



the beautiful journal page dana made for me in my journal.

work in progress: frida kahlo paper dolls

i had fun making these frida paper dolls. they are a mix of fabrics and paper and the butterflies are laser cut wood by porkchopshow.

i was inspired mainly by the painting Two Fridas

but i was also inspired by the vibrant colors she uses and i always love seeing her in photos with the flowers in her hair.