Good News, Bad News, All Around News Worth Day

A HUGE thank you to everyone who came out to support Monkey's first feature show on Friday! The opening showcased mythical beasts discovered by Rick Kitagawa (aka Monkey) and Grant Gilliland. It was fun catching up with new and old friends alike, we even met some of our blog readers in person! If you missed the showing, “Bestiarum Vocabulum” will still be on display at Big Umbrella Studios until the end of this month.

Monkey was busy painting and preparing right up until the moment it opened. This was a good lesson as it was his first feature and would like to plan more in advance for his split collaboration with Seal for the June OZ Gallery. At the same time, Seal was preparing her work portfolio and for her upcoming show this Thursday: “Warhol Reimagined: The New Factory.”

So after a lot of internal deliberations at the Monkey + Seal cave, we realize that we bit off a bit more than we could chew with a M-W-F blog format. After a few successive weeks of missing posts here and there, we regretfully realized that we're a bit overloaded. Now that Monkey is helping run Big Umbrella Studios, Seal is working full time on her portfolio and getting into gallery shows, and we'll both be painting for our upcoming feature show at Oz Gallery in June, we realized that for the time being, we are unable to deliver the blog posts in a quality and consistent manner. We were rather disappointed with ourselves over the last couple of weeks.

Posts have gotten shorter, some without images, and this is definitely NOT what we want. We want to offer our readers constant quality posts with thought-provoking content that inspires you to reach for the stars and follow your dreams and become even more awesome than you already are. We get a pleasure of writing these posts and sharing with you our honest lives.

So after lot of careful considerations, in order to deliver consistently with high quality content and illustrations while practicing the sustainability that we often preach, we decided that it would be best for our readers and ourselves to blog our main posts only on Wednesdays. Our main posts will be our new posts about inspiration, meeting your goals, chasing your dreams, and will be accompanied by new high quality illustrations each week.

Because in the end, we want to spend the time and quality on making sure the Wednesday posts are excellent, we'll continue to have posts here and there of show information, reviews, and random goodness, but they will be unscheduled and flexible. So be sure to subscribe and/or check back so you won’t miss a beat.

We really appreciate everyone sticking with us thus far, and as our journey is far from over and is actually climbing much faster than we anticipated, we hope you'll continue on with us for years to come. We really couldn't have done it without you. Thanks so so so much for all the support and we'll see you on Wednesdays for now!

Monkey + Seal in a show tonight!

Hi hi everyone! Tonight (Friday, January 21 if you're reading this some other day than when we're writing this), Monkey + Seal are going to be in another gallery show!

We're both participating in the "A House of Cards" show opening from 7-11pm tonight at Big Umbrella Studios, located at 906 1/2 Divisadero St (at McAllister), SF, 94115. If you google it, make sure you look for 906 Divis, as the .5 sends you off someplace else.

If you're local, bus lines 24 and 5 are literally about twenty steps or less away, so we recommend coming via public transportation (because street parking can get sort of tough).

Anyway, Monkey just hung the show last night, and he is pleased with the awesomeness and variety of styles that will be showing. Both of us will have new work, and Monkey will have some suuuuper old pieces up that no one has ever seen before!

There is also going to be poker, a tarot card reader, and three different food carts. It'll be a spectacular evening, so we hope to see you there!

Psst - we won't be able to be there until 8pm, so if you'd like to meet us, wait til then! Yay!

PS - If you'd like to see some behind the scenes photos of the gallery getting ready for the show at our last Wednesday Nite Artgasm, check them out here!

Help Us Help You

Hi everyone! Monkey here. I just wanted to remind you all tomorrow night is Big Umbrella Studio's grand re-opening! I'll have 9 new paintings up, and we'll be on hand selling our ties and prints and shirts. We'll also be live printing the t-shirt version of Panda Rage (see above), as well as a new single color shirt design of a cat-fish, illustrated by Ms. Eve Skylar herself. There will also be treats from Sweet As Pie Bakery (an up-n-coming local bakery), live painting, and some great art on the walls. It's tomorrow night (Thursday) from 5-10pm at 906 1/2 Divisadero St x McAllister!

Anyhoo, so I just wanted to take the time today to instead of blab about a bunch of stuff, to instead ask you, our readers, about what YOU want from us. I'm itching to put out another guide, but I'd like to know what kind of guide is going to help you out the most.

Specifically, I'd like to know if you had your way (regarding art and creating art and being an artist), what type of free e-guide would you like us to make for YOU. What do you want to see?

Do you want more info on marketing? How to approach craft fairs? Pricing? Interviews with other successful artists? Whatever you'd like, we want to know what it is. Along with that, what are your greatest fears/concerns/issues that you're facing regarding art? We'd like to be able to help out with that, so we need to know the problem so we can address it. That said, what is your ideal outcome (ie. what would you like our next guide to help you achieve?)

Are you having trouble making time to create and would like the outcome to be more consistent creating? Maybe you're scared of making an online shop and want to end up with your own artshop.com? Whatever it is, let us know!

So please let us know a)what guide you'd like us to custom create for YOU, b)the issues that you're frustrated with or are most scared of, and c)what your ideal outcome would be after getting our guide.

We'd really love you to put your answers in the comments below, as I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to be concerned about the same thing, but if it's a bit scary, we'd love to hear back from you via email, or you could even facebook message us! Thanks!

Big Umbrella Studios! Bazaar Bizarre!

Yay! Lots of Monkey + Seal action coming up this week! We're going to be vending at two different shows this week (!) and we'd love to see you there! Both are free to attend, so we'd love you to stop by and say hi!

The first is going to be at Big Umbrella Studios at 906 1/2 Divisadero St (x McAllister) this Thursday (the 9th!). Not only will we unveil our new workshop program for 2010, but there will be some live painting, and Monkey + Seal will not only have set up shop, but there should be some other great stuff for sale by the other artists!

Additionally, we'll be doing live screen printing for a new shirt design! Fancy! Hint: If you want to bring your own shirt (as opposed to buying one from us), we'll knock $8 off the regular shirt price! We would probably recommend a red shirt. Especially if you like angry pandas...

The Big Umbrella Show goes from 5-10 and we'd love to see you there!

And for everyone who wants to shop handmade + local this holiday season, we'll be vending at Bazaar Bizarre this weekend! It'll be at Fort Mason in the Herbst Pavillion on Saturday the 11th from 12-5, and Sunday the 12th from 12-6. The show is free and there will be over 150 vendors to choose from - holy moly! We, of course, would love to see you at the Monkey + Seal booth, but you should definitely check out some of the other awesome vendors.

There is also a pretty awesome Cocktails and Crafts party Saturday from 7-10pm at the same location where there will be hands-on workshops, and tons of sweeeeet goodies! Tickets for this special event are $10 and you can buy them here.

Just to avoid confusion: During the day, it's free, during the night, you gotta sign-up and pay. Yay! Oh, that rhymes...

Anyway, we'd love to see you at the show so please drop by and say hi!