Hearts and Laserbeams

Yesterday Josh walks into our office and says what no chicken owner wants to hear:

“We’re missing a chicken.”

Ummmm WHAT?!?! How are we missing a chicken?! I mean, last fall I saw a hawk hanging around our backyard cuz he was looking for a chicken dinner, but that was because our dog was in the other room and couldn’t tell us something was up. And none of the neighborhood cats messes with our chickens! Where could Judy Plume have gone?!?!

Josh went back out to the yard and searched for another 20 minutes. And then he noticed the box under our lemon tree.

The sturdy one that sits on its side as an option for places for our chickens to lay their eggs.

The one that was now sitting overturned.

“Nooooo….,” he thought, “she’s not under there.”

But oh yes. Yes she was. With 2 eggs, which leads us to believe she’d been stuck under there for 2 days. Josh let her out and she hightailed it for the water bowls, where she spent the next 10 minutes drinking, poor girl!

Moral of the story? A chicken in the hand is worth 2 eggs in the cardboard box you find her in 2 days after she’s gone missing.

I got some really exciting news this weekend! Hearts and Laserbeams has been working with a licensing agent for the last few months to try and get some deals going, and get our characters out there in stores. It looks like we may have a deal with a tee company in the near future! If all goes well there may be shirts with Hearts and Laserbeams  characters on them in actual major stores by the end of this year! If all goes not well, there may be a Hearts and Laserbeams employee (me) crying in the dark with a bottle of wine… er… apple juice (until our little boy is born. then bring on the vino!).

I’ve been taking a break working on the licensing stuff for the past couple of weeks because it’s been ungodly long work days for the last few months, but now that a deal is pending I gotta make like Devo and crack that whip and finish up what this company’s gonna need art-wise so all goes smoothly when/if a deal gets signed… I just wanted to share the excitement – keep them fingers crossed that this thing goes through! Hooray!

I just wanted to share the progress on a wedding cake topper I’ve been commissioned to paint for an upcoming wedding! I love working collaboratively on projects like this, it really turns out a unique result. The bride has all kinds of quirky, eclectic and handmade elements she’s incorporating into her wedding, including a bouquet made of vintage brooches and earrings. It was such happy kismet when I poked through my collection of vintage plastic flower beads for the girlBot’s headpiece and found one random sparkly flowery vintage clip-on earring that looked perfect to use as a bouquet!

I can’t wait to show you guys more progress on this piece – I’ll be continuing work on it this weekend!

Here’s a little sneak peek of style guide stuff I’m working on this week – check out some fun apple characters!

Ok so last night was a blasty at the Long Beach Museum of Art! They were having their After Dark event, and invited Long Beach Craft Mafia to set up shop to show off and sell our wares and do some demos throughout the night. I set up my merch (which Tamara of Crayon Fawn was awesome enough to sell for me!) and then sat down to an evening of caricaturing.

It’s funny how self-conscious I get about my drawing sometimes, and caricatures is even worse because someone is right there watching you do it… What if you screw it up? What if it doesn’t look enough like them? Good lord what if they hate your drawing?!?

What was different last night, as opposed to other caricature events I’ve done, is this one was mostly adults. And they were just as enthusiastic about my drawing as kids at 8th grade grad nights. So it’s time to stop worrying about whether or not my drawings are good enough. They’re fun, and they’re funky, and that’s all you need to know! I know I’ve mentioned this before, but if you’re in the LA or Orange Counties I am definitely available to draw at your party just email me and we’ll make it happen!

Also awesome about last night – I changed one small technique in my caricature drawing towards the end of the night, and it solved something that’s always been a little bit of a problem for me! Thumbs up for progress and change and practice and drawing! Here’s a few warm-up sketches from last night – I’m hoping my buddies Steph and Ellen will scan in their caricatures so I can show ya a couple of finished drawings!

In closing, I want to go back through all my almost 8 years of blog posts and find out just how many of them start with “ok so”. The end!

(Also, when I research the “Ok so” thing, I will count how many posts end with “the end!”)

I only signed up for one event this summer, because I wanted to take it easy with the little one on his way (good job spending gobs of free time on licensing stuff, Steph!). That one show I’m doing takes place tomorrow night in Long Beach, and if you’re free you should go!

Photo from Long Beach Museum of Art website

Long Beach Museum of Art is hosting After Dark from 6-10pm (with a 5pm early entry for museum members), and it’ll be a blasty. It’s $10 to get in (free for museum members), with drink specials, djs spinning some tuneage, access to the museum’s galleries, and a chance to win a free iPad! Make it worth your while and ride your bike there, you’ll receive a voucher for a free appitizer!

Long Beach Craft Mafia will be there doing crafty demos and offering up some unique handmade shopping – Hearts and Laserbeams will be there sellin’ mousepads, coasters, magnets, pins, little 3″ paintings, hand-screenprinted tees and underwear… AND we’ll be drawin caricatures til 9pm! And the caricatures will be cheap!! I’ll be workin for tips, so whether you can only afford to spend one dollar or 70 dollars, I’ve got a drawing for you! Come get yourself drawn up in a wacky, non-traditional style and be the envy of all your friends! Or some of your friends. Some of your friends might be caricature snobs. Those friends aren’t much fun.

Click here to check out the Long Beach Museum of Art’s website for more details - see you tomorrow night!

I’m so close to being done cleaning up poses for the new Hearts and Laserbeams style guide! This little guy is by far my favorite new robot pose:

Just two more poses to clean up before I can move on with this project!! But first, I will be doing a whole lot of relaxing with the remainder of the holiday weekend. How was your 4th of July?

Work continued on the new Hearts and Laserbeams style guide last night, including a good chunk of hours sketching my robots for fun new graphics! Here’s a sneak peek:

I’m excited to spend some time today cleaning up all the sketches into finished art for the style guide before heading to the beach to check out the Queen Mary fireworks with Gayle! Unfortunately, Josh is workin tonight – but we both have the day off tomorrow to hang out and make up for it!

Hope y’all have a great 4th of July – don’t forget we’re havin’ a sale at the etsy shop! Use coupon code KABOOM! before end of the day tomorrow (7/5) and you’ll get 20% off your order!

last night, i let our dogs out for the last time before bed at around 10:30. and as i was letting them in, i thought to myself “self, you should go outside and close that chicken coop door.” and the exact same time i thought it, i walked into the bedroom and crawled into bed.

zzzzzz…..

around 4am, the dogs and i were awoken by a chicken-y sounding ruckus coming from the backyard. “OH SHIT!!” i thought to myself, putting on my glasses and runnin to see what the hell was going on, jimmy runnin in front of me to regulate any backyard cat intruders. it was dark, so i couldn’t really see what the eff was up, but i saw one lone chicken kinda hanging out near the patio. the rest were tucked safely into their nesting boxes. and jimmy starts barking like crazy over by our little patch of corn. he’s cornered himself a possum!

OH SNAPS!!! i thought… what do i do, what do i do… if jimmy engages with this thing who knows what the hell kinda diseases he’ll pick up. what do i do… and i spot the hose lyin near me. it’s good on two levels – if i spray the hose jimmy will back off because he hates most watery things, and hopefully it’ll scare the possum away to boot. so i set that thing to FULL STUN, and i started lettin that possum have it. he took off into our corn patch looking for cover, and found none since i just walked over and sprayed directly at him from my side of the little fence. there’s a big ol’ star jasmine plant in that patch, too, and as i was spraying i saw that plant start rustling something fierce, like our freaky little middle of the night visitor was making a hasty getaway!

i ushered the stunned chicken (one of the Doublemint Twins) on the patio back into the coop and went back to bed. she’s got a tiny bit of a limp this morning, but she may have just landed wrong coming out of the coop. we’ll keep an eye on her, but i’m pretty sure she’ll be all right!

here’s what i wanna know – why aren’t possums ever cute when you see em in real life? they’re never all kitten/puppy/fluffy “hi i’m adorable pick me up and love me!” like this possum here:

"Forest Green Possum" by A Cagey Bee

no. possums are never cute like that. it’s one of the harsh rules of nature. when you run into a possum at 4am, they always look more like this:

if anyone knows why that is, i think you should share with the class. also, i can’t be completely sure my possum last night was wearing a top hat. i was pretty tired when i was chasing him off, so he might have actually been wearing a monocle, not a snappy hat.

ok so last night was a little nerve-wracking for me! i drew caricatures for the bellflower high school prom, and it was the first time i’ve done a caricature party in almost 2 years. i was totally nervous that quite frankly, i was going to suck. because there hasn’t been a ton of time lately for sitting down to draw. and caricatures are something you gotta keep up on or else you start to lose it.

some would say i never had it, yuk yuk yuk! here’s where i get all conflicted and self conscious – i’m self-taught as far as caricatures go. and they’re far from amusement-park style. my caricature drawings – like the rest of my art – have a very distinct hand, and are kinda kooky lookin. a little off, a little funny, but still kinda cool as far as i know… i have had comments from a person or two that mine suck simply because they’re not ones you’d find at an amusement park. but i still enjoy em, and the folks that have me draw at parties as a paid gig have always seemed to like em, so there ya go! (it never helps that we’re our own harshest critics.)

i think the thing i love about caricatures is how freeing it is in terms of an art project. lots of times, whether i’m working on a design project for work or painting something for myself, there’s huge chunks of time involved. if it’s a design piece, there’s lots of revisions. tons of revisions.

caricatures are nothing like that – you spend 5-10 minutes drawing a cartoon of someone in sharpie marker, give it to them, send em on their way and move on to the next drawing. and you never see that drawing again. it never comes back for a revision or a tweak or a redraw. it’s so refreshing, and i think that’s part of the reason i keep doing it.

i’d love to do more caricature parties, i only have one more lined up through this entertainment company i work with during prom/grad night season and that bums me out! if you live in la, oc or riverside counties and are having a party, you should contact me and we’ll chat! in the meantime, here’s some of my warmup sketches from before the prom got started last night – enjoy!

(and if you don’t because you like traditional caricatures, please. be gentle.)