Here's a photo by my friend and wonderful photographer, Laura Musselman, from one of the few instances I get up in front of people and sing. My dear friend John Vanderslice came up to the northwest to play a few shows a few weeks ago and we sang "Nikki oh Nikki" to a quiet crowd at the end of the night. It is something I have wanted to do for years and it's easily one of my favorite memories of Seattle so far. Thank you to Laura for the gorgeous image!

I snapped a few shots of JV before the show. The second of these features the inimitable John Roderick of the Long Winters, who joined us after "Nikki" for "Pale Horse."

upcoming: illustrating saint bartlett

I am midway through a painting project that I have been working on in conjunction with the release of Damien Jurado's Saint Bartlett - illustrations based on the song lyrics, one piece per song. I'm still working away, but I thought I'd share a peek at the paintings I've done so far.

photo assisting for kyle johnson / the portland mercury

Last month fellow Seattleite (and rad photographer) Kyle Johnson shot the spring fashion shoot for the Portland Mercury, and I went down to Portland with him to photo assist. I always love a trip to Portland, and I'm a huge fan of Kyle's photos, so I figured it would be a fun time and a good experience. I wanted to share a few images from that day because even though we pulled it off in the end, it was a little bit more of an adventure than any of us were expecting. We started off the day like this:

"Unnamed Rd." Consider this foreshadowing. Twenty minutes later, we found ourselves in this:

That's snow on the ground. In May. Now, this was up on a mountain, but we quickly realized we weren't going to do a spring fashion photoshoot up here in the snow. The theme of the shoot was "open season" which meant the feel was supposed to be woodsy/hunting and there were going to be models holding guns as props. So we made the best of it and the one thing we did do up on that snowy mountaintop was shoot up the Portland Mercury sign you see in the photo at the top of this post (or, more precisely, Jay did all the shooting). The only shooting I did was photos.

Aside from the water droplets on my lens, those photos make it really hard to tell that there was still snow coming down from the sky. At any rate, we went back down the mountain and ended up shooting (photos) down by the river. You can check out the whole spread with Kyle's photos here (scroll down and click on "slideshow"). Until the next adventure, I've got these photos to remember it by.

damien jurado / saint bartlett

Damien Jurado's new album, Saint Bartlett, came out May 25th, and on May 29th he played an album release show here in Seattle at the Triple Door. I made this poster for it. The whole thing, from start to finish, was a made-by-hand process. I am going to attempt to document that process here, for those of you who are interested in that sort of thing - if you're not, you can just check out the images.

I have always made a great deal of my artwork on the computer, and this poster (along with one I made last fall as well as a large-scale painting project) is part of an attempt to unplug and get back to a more tangible process of making things. And it was a process!

This poster began as an idea: embroidery by hand only, with no aid from computers or machines in any way (with the sole exception of scanning the actual piece of fabric to reproduce it). I haven't done any embroidery since I was in elementary school, probably, so it required some preparation and planning. I skipped over to Stitches to purchase fabric, embroidery thread, and the incredibly crucial heat-transfer pencil (this was necessary for making a pattern). I sketched the whole thing up in regular pencil, first. Everything was drawn by hand, including the lettering. Then I flipped over my sketch and traced the lettering on the back of the paper with the heat transfer pencil. This gave me a heat-transferable sketch of the poster - backwards - enabling me to iron it directly onto the fabric so I knew where to place my stitches.

Labor-intensive as that sounds, the next step was definitely the longest part. Embroidering the band names was a long process, aided by the fact that the band names were none too short. I embroidered at home, at the Jurados', in the passenger seat of friends' cars, and on the way down to Portland for a shoot with Kyle Johnson (that post will come at a later date). I took to carrying my embroidery hoop around in my purse for whenever I had a free moment. To give you a point of reference, just one letter of Damien's name would take me anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour to complete, depending on the size and complexity. Luckily, I am incredibly satisfied by this kind of time-consuming handicraft; there's something about the near-tedium that I can really get into.

Once I finished the lettering, the trees were smooth sailing to the finish. We scanned it once, but I am a perfectionist and was not satisfied with the quality, so I ironed it out and re-scanned it. The original sits now atop my dresser, but prints are also available for $5 via Luckyhorse Industries, here. There will definitely be more unplugged tangible artwork in the near future...

(Last two photos by the incredibly talented Sarah Jurado)