Rushing the Gates

Gatekeepers can be scary.

We're super excited as Chris Guillebeau is launching his Unconventional Book Tour to promote his new book, and his stop in San Francisco is going to be at our favorite bookstore, Green Apple Books! We mention this, because a lot of what Chris has to talk about in his quest for world domination is that in the traditional method of doing things, there are lots of gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers are people who watch the gates of success and choose who gets to come in or not. Gallery curators/owners are gatekeepers. Juries for craftshows are gatekeepers. Buyers for companies are gatekeepers. These are the people whose job it is to filter through all the products and people who want success.

While some prefer to allow these gatekeepers to determine their path in life, Monkey + Seal do our best to limit the amount of say gatekeepers have on our success. We prefer to rush the gates. While no one is advocating bum rushing gallery owners, what we're talking about is either finding creative ways to bypass gatekeepers, or just set up our own gate and police it yourself!

Example: Say you want to get into a huge craft fair. Huge craft fairs are generally very expensive ($300 is pretty typical for a two-day show, Comic-con is more like $800-1200), and there is generally a jury that selects whether or not you get in. While saving up and making sure you have a great product to sell and what not, you may still not get in. What to do? Make your own craft fair.

While Monkey + Seal have gotten into some large shows and not others, last year we decided that we might as well put on our own show. Thus, along with other members of SF Etsy, we organized the 2009 Holiday Handmade Ho Down. We pulled in a couple thousand people into a nightclub, had 65+ vendors hawking their wares, and had a great time.

Granted, there were many sleepless nights, bouts of drama, and lots and lots and lots of work, but that event helped establish us as event organizers, and we were able to leverage that to create our own Paper Hat Productions in order to focus on another venue that has gatekeepers: gallery shows.

I will be the first to admit that organizing an event is tons of work. Tons, and tons of work. However, you're working for yourself and you get to call the shots, and that's really really cool. You're also held accountable for the show, for better or for worse, so with all the great opportunities, there's also a margin for failure. But as we say, failure isn't the end of the world, so what's stopping you? Go out there and rush the gates.

Woo, more press!

So while running around at the Handmade Ho Down, Monkey got flagged down by Sean of Ashcan magazine for a quick interview. You can read the mini-interview here! There is also a charming little photo (if we do say so ourselves) of Monkey and Seal at our booth where we are showing off our ties and prints.

We also got a review of the Bad Date Zine Issue 2 at Razorcake, which is basically THE underground punk rock fanzine! Sweet. You can read what they thought over here.

Thanks to Sean and the Ashcan crew and Andrew over at Razorcake!

Other news: Mark your calendars for January 30 + 31, 2010, when Monkey + Seal will be in the Artist's Alley at the Animation on Display convention in San Francisco's Japantown! Woo!

Handmade Ho Down photos and our next show!

The cover of the Handmade Ho Down Zine, illustrated and designed by M+S!

Monkey rifling through his small paintings for a customer.

Seal pointing out some of the buttons designs for patrons.

The Monkey + Seal table!

Another thank you goes out to everyone who supported us at the Ho Down! We are super fortunate and thankful to be so well-received at the event!

If you missed Monkey + Seal at the Handmade Ho Down, don't fret - there's still time to shop for the holidays. Although Monkey's spiffy ties aren't available online yet (he's working on it!), they, along with some new serigraphs and Seal's full gamut of giclee goodness will be for sale at the San Francisco Center for the Book's Holiday Fair! Friends of Monkey + Seal such as Aviary Press, Two Fine Chaps, and In Cahoots Press will all be there as well, so it'll be a great opportunity to snag some awesome books and works on paper! We hope to see you there!

THANK YOU!!

Monkey + Seal would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who supported us last night (and the past few weeks) to make Handmade Ho Down such an amazing success. Everyone who volunteered their time, bought stuff, just showed up and hung out, let us get out of class/work early, who dealt with Monkey's lack-of-sleep-craziness - we really couldn't have done it without you.

Seal sold out of a few of her prints and Monkey sold a bunch of ties and is almost out of an entire edition of prints. We made a lot of good contacts and met tons of awesome people. Thank you for your continued support and we hope to see you at our next show!

1 more day till Handmade Ho-Down!

Monkey and Seal can hardly contain their excitement for tomorrow's Handmade Ho-Down: Urban Craft Fair. This is the first ever Etsy-sponsored, urban craft show that Monkey helped to organize. They're will be live art, live DJs, booze, and 55+Crafters and artists selling handmade goods.

They are both excited to see all the DIY goodies, connect with other artists, and meet all the awesome people that will come by their booth (#41). They would like to take this time to thank and recognize all of their supportive friends, family, and colleagues who helped to make it possible. They look forward to seeing you tomorrow.


Yesterday, Seal spent 5 hours at the Geary Print Shop printing 650 copies of the official 2009 Handmade Ho-Down Zine. So be sure to pick one up on your way in. We are still always in need of volunteers, so if you have 1-2 hours of your time, please email Monkey at info(at)monkeyandseal.com We, and the rest of the committee would really appreciate it! DIY kids like us depend on your good will to make this event successful.

Last, but not least, Seal would like to introduce Monkey's new tie designs that will debut tomorrow.




Thank you and we hope to see you tomorrow at 1015 Folsom St. 6pm!

3 More Days Till Handmade Ho-Down

3 more days until Handmade Ho-Down this Thursday at 1015 Folsom St. 6pm-midnight. Monkey and Seal are busy in their art studio a.k.a their apartment cave preparing for this awesome one night show.

This is the first Etsy.com sponsored craft fair that Monkey is proud to be a part of as a committee organizer. It is part of Monkey and Seal's dream to travel to different shows and exhibit worldwide and live off our art. As long as people like it and we have a roof over our heads, we're pretty happy.

Here is another sneak peek at the illustration/prints that Seal will be selling. Along with the SF Zine Fest favorites of "Swamp Treehouse," "Tree Girl," and "Delicatessen," below is one of the many new prints that Seal will be introducing on Thursday. This is the finished acrylic painting, that was featured in an earlier process post 2 weeks ago, titled Seal's 90 thumbnails. This giclee is printed on Archival Utrachrome ink on 260 gsm premium photo paper.


Monkey and Seal are also a big fan of encouraging any young and old artists to blossom. They are donating some of their art for the DrawBridge raffle. Below is one of Monkey's serigraphs. Besides the image being a fun and awesome panda shooting laser beams out of its eyes, it is a hand-pulled 3 color serigraph (fine art silkscreen print) on 11.75" x 18" pastel paper, a limited edition of 11.


Seal is donating her giclee archival print of her original watercolor illustration titled Looking for Noah. 100% of the raffle will go towards Drawbridge, a nonprofit organization helping homeless children cope with their situation through art. Let's make the world a better place, one person, one art at at time!

Seal's Process: Swamp Treehouse in watercolor, gouache, and acrylic gesso

Both Monkey and Seal are looking forward to Handmade Ho-Down: Urban Craft Fair this upcoming Thursday, Dec.3rd. They will be selling original fine arts paintings and prints, handmade silkscreened ties, archival reproduction prints, zines, buttons, and more!

Below is one of Seal's archival glicee reproduction prints of her original illustration titled "Swamp Treehouse." So for this Saturday's Process Post, she will be doing a flashback and talking about an earlier work.

The original illustration was done on 15" x20" cold press illustration board, with watercolor, gouache, acrylic gesso, and graphite. The work was inspired by the story of Peter Pan, but Seal had always thought that Pan was a sinister figure, similar to the Pied Piper or the god of mischief, Pan. There is a selfish destructive, yet invitingly playful characteristics of Pan. So she decided that the Lost Boys' home would be in the swamps.

The sky and water were initially laid out in watercolor, she glazed some of the warm colors more opaquely with goauche. Below is a close up of the main tree on the right. She utilized acrylic gesso to create some of the undulations and textures on the moss and trunks.


Before working on the final illustration board, Seal does color studies with gouache on paper. She explored daytime and nightime lighting. These can be very rough, spending only 30-2 hours on each. She liked the mood of the foggy very early morning/late at night with the warm lights emitting from the treetops of the house. She pushed the different range of blues on the final painting to include some purples and greens.Seal is normally shy about showing her line drawings because they are unrefined and show a lot of mistakes, but below is a rare peek at her original line drawing before the color studies. Noticed she added a wooden boat to the left of the composition on her final illustration that was missing from the line drawing below, because she thought the habitants needed transportation to traverse across the swamp.

Seal will continue to do "gothic" series of the Peter Pan story. Please check back soon to see more. In the meantime, she hopes to see you at Handmade Hodown this Thursday. She will be showcasing this original painting of the Swamp Treehouse at the Monkey and Seal booth #41.

Zine review and Raffle!

We were just informed by the awesome people over at Ashcan magazine that our zine, The Bad Date Zine: Issue #2, was reviewed by their web magazine! Woo! You can go over and check it out here.

Also, if you are planning on hitting up the Handmade Ho Down (and you should), you should definitely come and check out the raffle to support DrawBridge, as two of Monkey's serigraphs and one of Seal's giclees have been donated to the cause. Soo, it'll be your chance to pick up a piece of Monkey + Seal artwork as well as donate to a great cause.

DrawBridge is an awesome little organization helping homeless children cope with their situation through art - they could really use a lot of help (their future is a bit financially shaky come February 2010), so if you can give, it's a good time to do so. They also are in need of art supplies, so if you have some stuff lying around that you aren't using, now is a great time to donate it to a great cause.

Specifically, they could really use:

Color and white paper Tempera and acrylic paints Face Paint Finger Paint Paint brushes All forms of Clay: Self hardening, Model magic, Sculpey Feathers Mini Pom Poms Googly Eyes

Paper maiche strips Masks Masking tape of all colors Irons Small or Child Safe Scissors Buttons Wire cutters Ironing Board Colored Pencils

iPods and speakers for art groups Polaroid cameras and Film Digital cameras 4 Line Phones

Thanks so much and we hope to see you at the event!

Another sneak peek at the ties!

Sorry this is such a short post, but we just wanted to share with you some of the new colorways that Monkey found are successful. He hope you agrees! Once again, they'll be making their big debut at the Handmade Ho Down!

Here's the Hazmat design in black on charcoal (for those who don't really go with the Radioactive Green color) and the Skull N Bones design in black on silver (for you non-pink people).

Monkey will be spending a good part of next week working on the ties (with more tie colors!) to bring a full selection of awesomeness to the Handmade Ho Down. Mark your calendars, and if you are interested in pre-ordering for a discounted price, let us know!

Handmade Ho Down needs some volunteers!

Hello everyone!

As you probably know (or maybe you don't, that's okay too) Monkey is one of the committee members that is putting on the Handmade Ho Down urban craft fair on December 3rd! It'll be a really awesome event, but the Monkey needs your help!

He needs more people to sign up to help guard the VIP room (yes, there's a VIP room!), sell raffle tickets, staff the info booth, etc., etc. Ideally you would sign up for a 2-hour shift, but if that's not possible, Monkey will take an hour shift - after all, we are relying on your good will to make this event uber-successful!

Anyhoo, if you are able to help out, please email Monkey at info (at) monkeyandseal.com. He (and the rest of the committee) will be super appreciative!

PS - there will be some stuff you can do earlier (ie. pre-6pm!) . There is even stuff you can do before then! Just let me know!

Reminder + Process: Coloring in Photoshop

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First off, as a reminder, our very talented Seal has been invited to showcase her artwork at the Saida Glide fundraiser event tonight at Sugar Cafe (679 Sutter St. at Taylor) in San Francisco. There is a fashion show at 9:30, but the event goes from 7pm til 2am. We'll be there from 7 til at least 11pm, networking, trying to sell our art, drinking, and doing some drawing.


Seal will be selling some fine art archival prints (giclees) for $25 of two of her newest work , as well as the original painting for the swamp house for $325 (or for $375 framed). Monkey might also go guerrilla-style (or is it gorilla style?) and sell some small prints and stuff for kicks (he'll have to wait and see how things are there).

Hopefully you'll stop on by and say hi!

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So today's Saturday process post is by Monkey. He'll be briefly explaining the basics of coloring in photoshop.

Hi everyone! So today I'll be explaining a bit how to do color a scanned line drawing in Adobe Photoshop. Examples of work I've done (and stuff that is suited for this sort of digital painting are things like:
and Notice both are really graphic with mainly solid linework and flat color mixed in. The way one does this is you start with a line drawing (I tend to do mine in a sketchbook or on paper as I don't really like to draw digitally if I can help it) that you scan in. After you scan it in, I usually clean up the half-erased marks and play with the levels to get my lines darker.

Here's my cleaned-up line drawing for the Handmade Ho Down poster and flyer.

You can see in the scan above that I actually didn't draw the flag logo yet...the logo was created the same way as I did the poster/flyer, but since it was already done I didn't want to redraw it, I left the top of the big flagpole off (I inserted it later digitally). Sometimes this is good if you already have an image that you're planning to work in - for me, leaving spots obviously blank is a good reminder that something needs to go there.

So here's where you start setting up PS to make coloring easier. Assuming all your lines are connected perfectly in your scanned drawing, you could just use the color bucket to paint large flat areas in your drawing. However, if you zoom in, you'll see that it'll eat into some of your linework, leaving it jagged at times. Thus, this is my preferred method. It's not quite as quick, but you'll get smoother lines.

What you do is first, right-click (or ctrl-click for mac mouse users) on the background layer (which should have your image in it if you opened it up in photoshop to start painting). Click on the "duplicate layer" and create a "background copy." Then, drag it on top of your background layer. Now, select your background layer and create a new layer between them. Select the background copy. In the photo below, it's labeled "Layer 1." Go to the little drop-down menu above the layers palette and change the layer property from "normal" to "multiply."
What multiply does is literally multiply the colors from that layer with the colors on the layer below it. Thus, any white space on your background copy will show pure color beneath it. Any blacks will show black. This allows you to paint on the sandwiched layer without affecting your original drawing. The only drawback to this is that you can't really use your paint bucket since this layer that you are coloring in is just an empty layer. However, like I said, it preserves your line quality, so it's almost like a coloring book where the black lines always stay on top of your coloring.

You could just create a multiply layer underneath the background layer, but I like to have a copy of the original drawing in case I need to make changes. This way, I can edit the drawing on my copied layer, and if I don't like it, I can always go back to my original background layer, make a new copy, and start from the original drawing.

In the screencap below, you can see which layer I'm painting on. Also, I felt it was prudent to point out the brush setting I use. Since I paint with a tablet (to be honest, I don't know how you can do digital art with a mouse), I have shape dynamics on, with size jitter at 0% and it being controlled by pen pressure. This way, the harder I press the fatter the line (to the max pixel size that my brush is set to), and the lighter I press the finer the line. This replicates brush control in real life - if you want to make a thinner line, you just use the tip of the brush. I also have the minimum diameter set to 0 so that I can use very very faint brushstrokes to make tiny, thin lines.
Also, note that I'm currently painting in RGB mode. This is great if you never plan to print out your illustration, but if you want to print it, BEFORE you start, change the mode to CMYK. Believe me, it'll make everyone happier.


So, after a lot of coloring and adding text and resizing things and moving things around, the little octopus guy turned out like this:
I ended up painting in the flag for the big logo, and replaced the hand-drawn SF Etsy flag with the actual logo. I also extended the pole and added the Etsy logo.

Anyway, that's it for now, and if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments and we'll get to them as soon as we can. Also, don't forget to show up to the Handmade Ho Down on December 3rd to meet us in person, check out our art, and see the grand premier of Monkey's new silkscreened ties! Thanks for reading!

Weekend recap, blog feature!

Hello! It was an eventful weekend for the M+S team as on Saturday, Monkey went to the Book Arts Jam to sell his serigraphs. After getting there, he realized that the Book Arts Jam is not really his target demographic, but sharing a table with Macy Chadwick of In Cahoots Press and artist Paola Horevicz made the time fly by. Monkey got to meet the lovely ladies of Pod Post, and friends Tom (Two Fine Chaps) and Megan (Aviary Press) were there as well (and Monkey also hitched a ride back with Megan - thanks again!). Monkey also had the debut of some of his newest prints - Panda Rage and Pandamonium!

Panda Rage - 2 color serigraph on Canson cover - limited edition of 11 - $25

Pandamonium - 3 color serigraph on pastel paper - limited edition of 11 - $25

As soon as he can get around to taking some decent photos (sorry about the glare - it's from the plastic sleeve they're in), we'll have them in the shop. In the meantime, if you really, really need your panda fix ASAP, contact us and we'll get you your copy right away!

Saturday night was super-nap-time for M+S as Seal had stayed up all night before preparing her latest works (the watercolor was shown in our latest Saturday process post), and Monkey was up packing and labeling his prints (good thing too, cuz we got a lot of orders over the weekend, yay!). We did manage to finish off the latest of the Japanese dramas that we watch, but nothing really productive.

Sunday was catch-up day, with Monkey packing prints, buying some paper for some new screen prints, and getting some painting done. Seal started thumbnails for her next illustrations, and both are catching up with laundry and cleaning the studio/apartment.

We were also featured on the Handmade Ho Down blog Monday, as Monkey is one of the committee members putting on the show. You can find out more about the genesis of Monkey + Seal over there!

Special Saturday post - The Illustrative process

So although things are getting a bit crazy for Monkey + Seal, we hope to bring you a bit more of what we do here on the blog. More paintings, more illustration, more Etsy goodness, more of everything!

We're going to try and add a Saturday post that highlights some of the new work that Monkey + Seal are working on. Works in progress (WIPs), studies, sketches, and finished work will all be highlighted. Some of the work might be featured on Monkey and Seal's personal art blogs, but we figured we should bring the art to you. So without further delays, our latest work!

This is an illustration by Seal taking on a new twist on the theme of Noah's Ark. Seal especially wanted to focus on the beings left behind by the Ark, and wanted to explore a futuristic, Star Wars-inspired world. The initial idea actually came because Seal just wanted to draw a spaceship...and ended up drawing weird creatures to inhabit the world. Seal has always been a bit disturbed by the story of Noah's Ark, as even as a wee little Seal, she was bothered by the fact that Noah left behind all these animals who, being amoral, had done nothing wrong.

It was created first by graphite and marker thumbnails to work out composition, storytelling, perspective, and major elements. Seal then scanned and enlarged the chosen thumbnail, then sketched it out full-size in blue illustration pencil. She then proceeded to refine the drawing, and then brought it back into Photoshop to color/paint the rest.


This is the promotional flyer for the Handmade Ho Down event that Monkey is helping to organize. It was inspired by the want to include a busy, crafty feel that incorporated the fact that the event is going to be held in San Francisco just in time for the holiday season. Monkey also really likes drawing octopi and squid, and based this flyer on an earlier illustration he did for fun:

In both cases, Monkey sketches out his rough idea, then slowly refines that image. Then, he inks the image and scans it in to color it in Photoshop. Usually Monkey will then take the image into Illustrator or InDesign and do the type work there.

We hope you enjoyed this look into our work and our process and have a great Saturday!

The Handmade Ho Down!

So Monkey has been hard at work as part of the organizing committee for the newest craft fair in town (at least, if you live in San Francisco): The Handmade Ho Down!

We're going to hosting this at 1015 Folsom, a nightclub that will be transformed into a crafting extravaganza! It's going to be held on December 3rd, from 6pm til midnight! There will be music, live art, and tons of awesome vendors of handcrafted goodies!

We also got sponsored by Etsy itself, so you know it's going to be good. On top of that, we're also putting this on to help raise money for Draw Bridge, an organization that organizes art programs for homeless children in all seven of the Bay Area counties! Awesome! They'll have a gift-wrapping station, so come and do some handmade holiday shopping and then get your gifts wrapped to support an awesome cause!

Of course, Monkey + Seal will be on hand with new products! Woo!