arghhhh!!

This photo makes me so sad about giving my white cowboy boots away. I had them for two and a half years in Tokyo and I never wore them so I gave them away when I was moving back to L.A....I just thought the time for them had passed...But now more often than not I'm wearing some kind of boot on my foot...and a pair of white cowboy boots would be great....Oh well, hopefully, the new owner is enjoying them. :-)

t-shirts are like haikus.

A good t-shirt design is like a haiku. You have to figure out how to say what you want with a limited amount of space, colors and words....It took me a long time to figure that out though because I don't really wear t-shirts with graphics on them hence I never really thought about how to adapt my work for that medium. When I was asked to submit some designs for a t-shirt project a couple months ago I really had no idea where to start. I submitted my painted illustrations point blank with a bajillion colors and no real message and a couple of other super (in my mind) "t-shirty" ideas but I really didn't know what I was doing. Luckily out of that messy bunch they accepted a design BUT rejected everything else. After that I started observing t-shirts more carefully; I may not wear them but sometimes I'm called to make them....so I must study. The best ones are simple but clever like a haiku. Anyways I guess the pointed observation has been paying off in little ways because now I get random t-shirt ideas all the time....

Oh, and it's rare but there are t-shirts that I do like. I'm drawn to stripey t-shirts, some trompe l'oeil stuff and t-shirts with photographic images on them. :-)



(this is cute and falls into my photographic image category)


(this one though it falls in the photographic image category not so much....although I do like the shape of the t-shirt better than the other one)

comme des garcons

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and I understand that people have different tastes but I was so in love, floored and taken with the Comme des garcons/Louis Vuitton collaboration that I was kind of shocked to find negative feedback and comments on blog after blog.
I mean my jaw dropped when I first saw it, in a good way. In my book this is the best collaboration yet, totally biased 100 percent my opinion. It is 100% Louis Vuitton but 100% Comme des Garcon, AT THE SAME TIME, now that is a good collaboration. My pet peeve with collaborations are the kind where artists or the collaborator just slaps on their design/illustration on a bag/t-shirt/etc without thinking about the design. With this collaboration Kawakubo takes her wabi-sabi aesthetic to create intentionally imperfect and surreal bags. I love the twists and turns in each bag and am waiting to see how the line divides between those who "get it" and don't.

chill!

I wrote a little review of a really cool zine, chillzine, for the newest issue of Beautiful Decay. It's on newstands now. :-)

Fruit Luck.

I've been having so much fruit luck. I'm really kind of apprehensive to jinx my great fruit luck streak by talking about it but it's really kind of amazing. I can't remember the last time I had a bad piece of fruit. Across all supermarkets: Trader Joe's, Ralph's, my local Korean market, everything I buy has been super scrumptious: Bartlett pears, Bing cherries, Oro Blanco grapefruits, Gala apples, plums, grapes, etc. It's not even like I know how to buy fruit. It's just dumb luck. I mean I know they're(read:yucky fruit) out there: I know my brother bought some sub-par Fuji apples recently but I didn't have any. So yeah, I don't know how long this streak will last but I'll just keep my fingers crossed.

(I got so excited I even did a little drawing!)

Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, passed away today at the age of 47. His last lecture, Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, is a glimpse at a truly extraordinary person.

Did anyone???

Did anyone watch Project Runway last night? I'm really only a casual viewer but I'll sit and watch it when it's on. Anyways, last night Natalie Portman was a guest judge and she came across to me as really sweet and unaffected. She reminded me of one of my good friends, Samira(she is amazing), in the way she spoke. She spoke deliberately taking her time to pick the right words, being careful to be sensitive to the person she was talking to, tapering criticisms with positive aspects about the garment that she liked. Her sweetness and caring was fresh! It's a new direction for this season; instead of acerbic wit how about empathy; a little less selfishness and showboating and more sincerity and selflessness in words. Groundbreaking!! Also at the end when she looked like she was going to cry I was really surprised at how vulnerable she let herself be to show. I mean she could've acted very coolly like all the other judges but to release her emotions like that! So my end conclusion of last night's Project Runway: Natalie Portman, nice girl....