In 2022, the US Postal Service released two non-profit stamps I designed under the guidance of art director Antonio Alcalá.
Since I was a kid I’ve dreamed about designing stamps, and I was so happy and proud to be able realize that dream working with the Postal Service.
Since the release it’s been fun to see the stamps on many envelopes! Hopefully you’ve seen them on mail you’ve received, too.
This year’s desktop calendar didn’t include my usual back panel showing the ID of all the months of birds and plants. Here is the list!:
January: Yellow Warbler and Amaryllis
February: Chipping Sparrow and Geranium
March: House Wren and Daffodils
April: Hermit Thrush and Tulips
May: Black Phoebe and Cactus
June: Hummingbird and Lilac
July: Yellow Breasted Chat and Bird of Paradise
August: Eurasian Collared Dove and Sunflowers
September: Northern Flicker and American Sweetgum
October: Blue Jay and Harvest Corn
November: Oriole Orchard and Kumquat
December: Cardinal and Holly
I’m very excited to announce that Found Image Press in San Diego, CA will be manufacturing and distributing my paper line starting July 1, 2022 for wholesale customers and July 15, 2022 for my online retail customers. This is an exciting change that has taken many good people over a year of planning and hard work.
For over 10 years I’ve been developing and growing my line. It’s been an incredible journey and an all-consuming labor of love that has connected me to a wide and wonderful community.
Now it’s time to step back from management work and focus my full energy on artistic creation.
When I started I had no idea what I was doing, I didn’t have any business experience or plan, I didn’t have any understanding of how challenging it would be. All I knew is that I wanted to be an artist on my own terms. I shouldn’t have had any hope of success.
Because of the kindness and support of friends and the community— shop owners that took a chance on me, fellow business owners that worked with me in trust, customers who came back to support a young artist, employees and reps who worked as a team, friends and family who tirelessly supported my efforts beyond reason— the line grew and found success.
Now my line spans hundreds of images and almost a thousand different products found in stores and museums across the country. Proceeds from sales through the years raised 25,000 meals for the Alameda County Community Food Bank.
I’m so proud of what was able to grow from strong community support. And I’m thrilled to hand off the production work to a trusted partner while retaining the freedom and artistic creativity to keep designing the images I want to make.
The future looks amazing: a continuation of new designs, great products, and exciting new art projects that I’m looking forward to sharing with you.
Found Image Press is a wonderful small printing company with 20 years of experience manufacturing and distributing paper products. Their facility in San Diego is state of the art, employs local labor, and reduces waste with print on demand abilities. But the main reason I chose to work with Found Image is because I trust them, I like them, and I think they’ll do a good job for you.
~ Rigel
Have a fun time browsing for gifts for Mom, your friends, or yourself at my studio sale this weekend!
I’ll be offering my all-new scarves, cards, calendars, towels, select jewelry, art prints, and more, all featuring my original illustrations. Take advantage on some smokin’ deals on samples and seconds, too!
Saturday, May 4
11 am - 5 pm
1701 1/2 Martin Luther King Jr Way (** NOTE my new location!**)
Berkeley, CA. Cross-street Virginia
NOTE: The calendar is now DONE! You can purchase it by clicking here
Woot woot! The 2018 Letterpress Desktop Calendar is ALMOST complete! We're just finishing up printing now. 2018 is the best year yet (IMHO) and uses 12 colors. Fantastic colors, lovely images, just couldn't be happier with the result.
Each year this calendar is one of my favorite projects. It is a true labor of love, planning, collaboration, and craftsmanship which spans months of work from start to finish. After spending many weeks in design mode, creating all the images and layouts, more weeks are spent with master printer Richard Seibert to mix ink colors and watch the project magically unfold on the press.
Since most people aren't familiar with what is involved with letterpress printing, the phrase "12 colors" probably doesn't mean much. Letterpress is different than digital printing, which can print unlimited colors in one press run. In letterpress printing, each color requires a separate physical plate and a separate run through the press.
Both printing methods can produce beautiful results. Digital printing is much faster and less expensive and I often use it. There are other differences that I won't go into here, but I will say that one of the most compelling and special aspects of letterpress, to me, is that it DOES require so much time and effort and craftsmanship.
Letterpress demands excessive thought, planning, and understanding of color and ink and machinery. Since there is so much time and effort involved in the process, the stakes are quite high. A mistake made on color 12 has the potential to render weeks of work (and many stacks of paper) worthless. I really look forward to the personal challenge each year to push my skills a little bit further each time, to try something a little new or to try to solve a problem from the previous year's calendar. I think most people are unaware of the differences in these printing styles, and one is as good as the other. But in this particular case, for me the journey is really a lot of the pleasure.
I posted an article a while ago detailing some of the processes of letterpress, including some info on the plates, the ink mixing, and some of the press work. The project I described in that article was working with only one small stack of paper and four colors.
To get an idea of how much more complicated this project is, consider that the desktop calendar is working with five large separate stacks of paper and twelve colors. #somuchwork #somuchopportunitytoscrewup!
The video above is my attempt to give you some sense of the steps in this project. It shows, more or less, the calendar as it progresses from the first to the last color.
Once the printing is completed, the pages are cut down and assembled into the final case.
Watching the project come together on the press is really magical. To see so many months of work coalesce and actually fit the vision I had during the design phase is a great feeling. I absolutely could not do it without closely collaborating with Richard, and I love that the success of this project is dependent on both our skills.
Love it!
I'm so excited and proud to say that a display of my products is now up in the produce section of my favorite grocery store, Berkeley Bowl (West location).
For those unfamiliar with the majesty of Berkeley Bowl, imagine a confluence of all of the delicious fresh bounty of the Central Valley and beyond PLUS all of the eclectic and adventurous tastes of the Bay Area PLUS all of the quirks and charm of Berkeley PLUS all the flavor influences of the many ethnic communities in the area, all at affordable prices (PLUS a produce department that could hold a 747!)
That is to say: if you're someone who eats food, you would love Berkeley Bowl.
With more rainfall than we've had for a few years, this spring in Berkeley has been absolutely beyond gorgeous. Follow daily images from my neighborhood walks on my Instagram page.
Photo courtesy Pier 1
Pier 1 recently released a set of 4 plates featuring my illustrations of various citrus. It was a very fun project to work on, and I liked trying to capture a lush vintage-y botanical aesthetic.
I never quite appreciated before this project how many pores and pits are in citrus peel, and how they catch the light.
Did you know that all of the common citrus fruits we now eat, including all the varieties featured on these plates, have been created by hybridizing mandarin oranges, pummelo, and citron?
I've recently finished illustrating and printing a custom letterpress card for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I took inspiration for the illustration from a fabulous 16th century work from their upcoming exhibit: "The Royal Hunt: Courtly Pursuits in Indian Art".
Pivotal to the success of this project was the decades of letterpress expertise of my printer, Richard Seibert. For some special projects where the experience wants to be deeper or more complex than normal offset or digital printing, letterpress is a gorgeous tool. The process is also very rewarding: slow, careful, with thought put into every action. It can also be hair-pulling and tear-jerking at times! But when the images start to appear, just as you imagined them (or better than you imagined!), color by color, all the stress dissolves and you feel dang proud and happy.
In this article, I wanted to give a very quick overview of the entire process of creating this card, but focus in-depth on just one tiny aspect: the mixing of just one of the ink colors. This encapsulates the care put into the entire process and gives a great sense of the extreme time and attention to detail that letterpress printing (and any hand-printing technique) requires. I hope to explain the other aspects of letterpress printing in more depth in later posts.
Above is my inspiration image, entitled "Hamid Bhakari Punished by Akbar". What drew me to this wonderful 16th century painting were the flowing composition of the animals scattered by the hunter's charge: ordered yet fluid. I also loved the gorgeous colors. In this custom card I wanted to capture similar movement and feeling yet interpret the scene in my own particular style.
I first created the illustration, focusing on movement, color, and composition, refining until every line felt correct. Then I separated the illustration into its component colors, since letterpress printing requires each color be run through the press using a separate run. Then I went over to my neighbor and friend's studio, master letterpress printer Richard Seibert, and together we started work on producing the final letterpress card.
First, plates were made from my final illustration. One plate was created for each color of the card. The final card has four colors: red, gold, blue, and black (black for the text on the back), and so four plates needed to be made. Since each ink color requires a separate run through the press, this card required four press runs.
The red and the gold plates
First, I found the approximate shade of red I wanted in the Pantone color book. A Pantone book is a book of color swatches used as a guide for printers and designers. Each color comes with a mixing "recipe". The color I chose, Pantone 485, is made by mixing 8 parts Pantone Yellow with 8 parts Pantone Rubine Red. This is the same type of color system used at hardware stores which can mix you a can of house paint based on a variety of color swatches.
Identifying the initial red color... but it still needs a lot of work
However, one big drawback of the Pantone color system is that it just doesn't have very many colors. If you think about the wall of house paint colors at the hardware store, there might be 5 or so different shades of blue-green, but if none of those pre-mixed shades are perfect then you have no option but to choose the closest one.
If you want your image to match a special vision, the ink probably needs to be hand-mixed, and that means using the book only as a starting point and then using experience, intuition, and theory to create the final color. One of the (many) huge benefits of working with an artist like Richard is that he understands how important color is and so will patiently hand mix inks over and over again, making minute changes, until we're both happy with the final color. Not to say that we don't sometimes have spirited discussions over the particulars of colors and how they should best be mixed! Sometimes our opinions differ on slivers of difference I'm not sure would be very detectable to anyone who hasn't been staring at it for hours. But he is dedicated as I am to getting the right result and that's the kind of person I like working with.
A can of ink and a mixing knife
Hand-mixing inks is a physical job. Inks are mixed on a metal or glass surface and require a lot of blending with a stiff flat-bladed knife to thoroughly distribute the pigments.
Envisioning what final color you want while at the mixing table can be difficult, especially in projects with many colors. Printed on paper the colors will often interact with each other to produce different hues. I'm not just talking about colors on top of each other blending together, but colors side by side which alter your perception. So you have to plan ahead for that interaction when you're mixing the individual colors. Since the inks are printed one at a time, if you print an entire run of reds which are too blue, then all the subsequent inks on your entire job need to be tweaked to compliment the altered first color. However carefully you plan before hand, you can quickly veer off into the wilds of intuition. Every additional interacting color increases the stress exponentially. That can get really nerve-wracking when you have a job like my 8-color letterpress desktop calendar... talk about a challenging color-mixing project!
Mixing different reds-- using red, black, green, and yellow
Also, some inks have more transparent pigments than others, which makes mixing less straightforward. For example, adding equal parts of a red and a yellow will not make an orange: it will make a red that's so vaguely yellow-tinged that you wonder if you hallucinated adding yellow at all. So sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error to come up with the correct final color.
Another difficulty is that the color you see while mixing is NOT the color that will print. Letterpress applies the color very thinly onto the paper, so the resultant color is much lighter (and often a very different hue) than what you see on the mixing table. Applying the ink to the press, running the press, discovering you've mixed the wrong color, and then cleaning the whole press with solvents before starting over is a huge pain, takes a lot of time, and is rather demoralizing when it's getting on to dinner time and you're still trying to figure out the right red.
The drawdown test applied to a hand-mixed ink: the two reds are made from the same ink.
Luckily, there is a test called the "drawdown" test that approximates the final color without using the press. (That's what Richard calls it, anyway). While applying a lot of pressure on the mixing knife, you scrape the thinnest possible line of ink down a piece of white paper. Then, because this ink line will still be darker than the final printed ink color, you try to identify the lightest area of the ink line (usually just a little dot). Using crazy Wonder Woman powers of visualization, you try to block out the surrounding colors and visualize only that very lightest, very smallest spot in the line of ink, then try to visualize that color working with the other colors that will be printed on the card. It's not rocket science... and it's also not incredibly accurate. I find myself saying, "I dunno, Richard!" an awful lot. But it does at least give the right direction to go in.
The good thing (for me) is that Richard is incredibly experienced in visualizing things like this, and very patient, too.
More reds...
I thought the initial mixed color was too cherry red-- I wanted it more tomato-y red, and a little duller. Here's where another challenge arises: ever tried to describe a very specific color to another person? It's not that straightforward. Turns out, adjectives are open to a lot of interpretation. Enter patience and experience again, plus referencing the Pantone book ("can we bring the color more towards this swatch, but bring the saturation down to this swatch, and darken everything overall?") . Plus there's the interaction of the printing ink pigments, which follow their own bizarre logic (Did you know that a green can be made by mixing yellow and black inks?).
One of these is the red we want!
But, when we saw the (twentieth?) drawdown we both instantly knew it was the right color. Much high-five-ing was had by all. It had taken multiple hours to come to this color, but it was worth it. On to the press to print the red! And, after the red, we repeated this process with the other mixed colors (gold and blue). This project was truly a labor of love.
Below is Richard setting up the card for printing on his lovely Heidelberg cylinder letterpress. I can share details of the press in a later post, but for now suffice it to say it's a beauty of a machine from way back in the day and is a whirring, clacking, suction-cup-lever-wheel-gear-cast-iron, multiple-tonned incredible printing miracle. I am so pleased with the way this card turned out and am excited about the next project!
This card is available exclusively from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Exhibit information:
The Royal Hunt: Courtly Pursuits in Indian Art
June 20–December 8, 2015
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
www.metmuseum.org
One of my favorite local spots is the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. The Garden's incredibly gorgeous grounds house one of the nation's most diverse plant collections, and I love visiting in every season. This spring has been especially gorgeous. Despite our drought, the garden had a fantastic bloom and also hosted a large population of breeding newts in its Japanese pond. I had never seen newt eggs before, but this year they dotted the pool like little outer-space capsules. Very cool!
I'm so pleased to have had a chance to work with the Garden to create their 125th Anniversary logo. The Garden wanted to maintain elements of their long history and tradition while also updating their look for 2015. I created a logo with an updated take on their traditional signature rhododendron flower, and also played with a mixture of traditional and modern fonts and layouts.
A fun project with a wonderful organization!
Chino Farms, inspiration for all my vegetable and fruit prints and also home to some of my closest friends, is featured in this month's issue of San Diego Home/Garden Lifestyles! Their pop-up shop, a vegetable rack filled with a small selection of hand-selected products, is wheeled out every weekend. Like the Chino farm itself, the pop-up shop delivers incredibly delicious and high-quality products presented in an understated and elegant fashion. If I can't be at the farm all the time, at least my towels and calendars can.
The farm is definitely worth a visit next time you're in San Diego!
Chino Farms
6123 Calzada del Bosque
Rancho Santa Fe, CA
UPDATE: Thank you for your votes! I am one of two finalists for the Eco Choice Award. Here we come, NYC!
I'm so excited to announce that my new line of "Love" Animals greeting cards is one of 10 finalists for the NY NOW's "Eco Choice Award" competition, in the "Most Sellable" category!
Winning this award would greatly increase awareness of my artwork and the sustainable choices I am making. You can help! Winners will be selected by popular vote, so please consider voting for this product.
Click here to cast your vote. Please scroll down to the bottom, and choose my name from the "Most Sellable" drop-down list. Thank you! Voting ends Jan 9, 2015.
These cards (like all my cards) are made with 100% post consumer waste paper made with 100% wind power, and printed by a local family-run business here in Berkeley. The envelopes for these cards are are also 100% recycled paper, and the individual cards are packaged in 100% compostable cellos.
NY NOW is the gift industry's top tradeshow, with over 2,800 exhibitors and 35,000 trade attendees.
