Hedge Society

2010 Calendar 10: Sandra Juto

More lamination! To hold in all the goodness that is Sandra Juto's illustrations. One pocket calendar is $4 or get all 8 for $25.

 

2010 Calendar 7: Year of the Tiger Kitty

I am not a fan of cats. I'm fairly allergic and I think they know this. A cat that is avoiding everyone else for miles will seek me out for attention. I once had a cat chase me around a dining room table. All in good fun until I am the one scratching my own red and weepy eyes out.

If I did enjoy cats, this would be a good calendar.

 

Year of the Tiger Kitty
$15 USD

16.5 x 24 limited edition, silk screened poster
signed and numbered

T is for t-shirt: Part 3

I finally got the chance to order something from boygirlparty.com, the online shop of illustrator Susan Ghahremani. For a while, it was difficult to get her work in Canada unless you were able to access some of the things - magnets, journals, etc. - distributed by Chronicle Books. I think you can order through her Etsy shop to get things shipped to Canada now.

My Tiny Niece really likes this Finch Tree shirt. I and my shirts aim to please the tiny people of the world. 

 

T is for t-shirt: Part 2

My art work is still not up in the latest place. I bought this little piece from Tiny Showcase because it reminded me of the bungalow in Calgary that hosted so many projects and gatherings over more than a decade.

 

I also ordered a Ray Fenwick shirt. It was borrowed a number of times so I had to order another for myself and the borrower. (You know who you are.) I recommend spending some time at Fenwick's website and taking the time to be on the Tiny Showcase mailing list if only to be reminded every Tuesday that people are making good art.

 

Tiny Showcase has a number of great shirts. I've given this Jen Corace to a friend and recently purchased this Lizzy Stewart.

And now to order in some sunny days.

T for t-shirt: Part 1

There was no time for blogging. But now there is and the time between our last entry in May to now has brought some t-shirt weather. And so I happily re-begin the Hedge Society blogging with a look at some favorite wearable art.

It is difficult for many illustrators to produce t-shirts. If you produce buttons or prints, one size fits mostly all. Many independent artists make very little money on each piece and clothing requires different sizes and colors and can be bulky to mail, cutting into profit or requiring a higher price than some are willing to pay in an era of 2 for $15 mall shirts.

I'm partial to shirts that promote small causes or independent artists. We begin with Jeff Kulak, an artist I met at an independent art fair in Edmonton. I bought his book Alphabet Boys. I liked the look and feel of this collaborative work.

 

And I was able to pick up this fun little piece to wear on the occasional Canadian sunny day:

I wish I could find a source for this one as well. I'd take it in tiny and a little less tiny than tiny for me because it looks like a lot of fun.

Daily: Vinyl Pressing Plant/Memorable Tweet/Paper illustrations

Detroit's Last Vinyl Pressing Plant on the Hedge's Moving Pictures Tumblr

(also see our post in honor of Record Store Day)

Memorable Tweet: @paperedtogether

Paper Illustrations of Carlo Giovani :

Daily: In Love/ Earth Day

Sadly this print called I think I'm in Love by Etsy artist Rosie Music is sold out. But there are other versions with a plain background. Glasses, books, stolen glances - all good things. 

Most succinct argument for Earth Day:

Liz Lemon: (after a prop Earth catches on fire) This Earth is ruined. We gotta get a new one.

Stories from Beyond Magazine. Part 1: The Cat

Once upon a time, we got quite a bit of mail in the office from students looking for magazine internships. We couldn't accommodate too many, being a small office with limited space and resources. But an email from Edmonton, Alberta caught our eye when a photography student pleaded: "Please don't make me spend my intern week in a Sears portrait studio." OK, he had us there. 

So Scott drove to town. We met and talked about upcoming bits we might need for future issues. Then he wandered around taking photos and delivered all his images to us at the end of the week. These are the ones we liked the most. The first photo ended up on a page called Non-Linear Conversation in Issue 13: Beauty.

 

I don't believe Scott works in photography anymore but we hope he had a good week. Some people will always have Paris; we will always have this cat. This evil, evil cat. Here's how it turned out on the page (click for a pdf version).

(The cat illustrations, by the way, are by Aaron Leighton, who has gone on to do lovely award-winning things in Toronto. Aaron shocked and awed his way into our hearts and minds by sending us an email telling us our first design effort waaaay previous to our no-ads version needed fixing. He was right. Today, his approach is still known as the "You Suck!" method of finding freelance illustration work, second only to the "That's Pa-THET-ic!" method of finding freelance editing work.)

Daily: Afraid of worms...

Tell her you were afraid of words.

What?

Words.

Because I was afraid of worms, Roxanne!

Worms!? What are you saying to me?

When I said "worms" I meant "words", Roxanne. 

===

A little space from the written word for today:

Illustrations from a 1968  book on aluminum via @markjohns

And we're fond of 365 projects, people doing a little something every day. We'll post a whole list of those sometime but for now try this A Drawing a Day set.  We especially like Class Notes meet their Doom.

And Bill Cunningham's enthusiastic narrated fashion slide shows On The Street are always great fun. This his show from Inauguration Day with blankets and coats of all kinds.

23: Friday Roundup: Hope and countries

Let's just pretend it's Friday. I wanted to post this last week but it wasn't quite together. The painting is by the talented Dustin Parker who we found out about via twitter (@dustinparker). Love that twitter.

TED is featuring a meditation on hope by surgeon and writer Sherwin Nuland (12:37 mins). Nuland mentions one of my favorite Vaclav Havel quotes, good for those who think hope mongers do not have a sense of reality -a thing I always find silly as many of the most hopeful people in the world are waist deep in areas that hold incredible suffering while couch ridden cynics press keyboard buttons and call them impractical and naive. Havel says:

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It is hard to do the work of well-researched critique whether it comes in the form of satire, faux news, or in-depth analysis. But critique shouldn't be confused with the kind of off-the-cuff cynicism that is evidence of a shriveled heart. It's okay to hope that someone will be a good leader, will set a higher standard that maybe even he or she can't attain. We aren't being tricked. We aren't looking for a messiah. We're hoping for the best despite our shriveled hearts.

And with our own Canadian government mess coming to the fore as we "un-porogue" things in the upcoming week, I still have hope in spite of all the silly things we do individually and collectively. There's still Neil Young. There's money that may not be worth a lot in other places but it's colorful and displays pond hockey players on its back instead of drawings of guns and tanks. We know enough writers, bloggers, artists, good human beings and citizens of all kinds to believe it's okay to hope. 

====

The New York Times has a behind-the-scenes feature on Obama's People, the photo shoot that introduces President Obama's new administration. I like how the photographer mentions that the identical background outlines how different people will occupy spaces. Those of us outside of the American system may want to match people up with "This one would be CJ Cregg, that one would be Josh..."

The BBC has a short piece called Three Generations: Little Rock to Obama.

CBC Radio had Canadians vote on "The Top 49 Songs from North of the 49th Parallel" for Obama's Ipod. Hey, at least we didn't give him hockey skates. Although we are his first visit so there's still time. Here's the list complete with samples.

And you know we're all about the papercraft at the Hedge Society so here's a downloadable paper model of Air Force One  (via Make). And via Cubecraft, a build your own cubed paper Barak.