Alien/ation: an Art Riot Extravaganza - TOMORROW!

Today's post is a friendly reminder that tomorrow, July 10th, is going to be the event that Monkey + Seal (as Paper Hat Productions) has been working on for the past three months. We've been super fortunate to collaborate with the Hyphen Magazine team, and we are proud to bring you Alien/ation: An Illustration Show.

We are honored to be showing among some amazing artists such as Kim Herbst, Joseph To, and Yoko Furusho, to name a few, and our favorite vegan baker, Jen Chau from Black Orchid Bakery will be on hand with cupcakes that are really frickin' amazing.

A preview of what Seal will be showing

We also want to emphasize how excited we are about the raffle - there will be another collaborative Art Battle, but this time it'll be a triple threat match of Monkey, Seal, and Joseph To. Each will start a painting based on an audience-submitted theme. Then, they'll move on to the next person's canvas and start painting, then they will switch again so that everyone paints on everyone's piece. Finally, the artist will move back to the original painting they started and will finish it off. Exciting, huh? Even better, these pieces will be raffled off at the end of the night.

A free artist's reception is from 5:30-6:45, and doors open at 7:00. Admission is $5 (or $15 if you want to get a subscription to Hyphen). The first 25 paying guests at 7:00 will get a swag bag with some limited edition goodies inside. If you want the swag, we suggest getting there early.

A preview of what Monkey will be showing

Where else can you win original art, eat awesome cupcakes, get free stuff, and check out some cutting-edge illustrators? No where (at least no place that we're aware of). Thus, you should definitely come check out our show, and don't forget to bring cash if you want to drink since SPACE gallery (1141 Polk x Sutter) is a 21+ only, cash only venue.

Also, this is really the only night to be able to see all this fantastic art in one place, so we highly recommend it. Besides new work by Monkey + Seal, the other art being hung is really amazing and it should be a really awesome event. We hope to see you there!

Deadlines Can Be Your Friend

Deadlines are a mixed bag for Monkey + Seal. While they serve to create an endpoint to a project, they can be really stressful and emotionally taxing. We think it all depends on how you use deadline and the boundaries that you set.

For personal work, deadlines can help push you to focus and prioritize more on a specific project that will force you to really work on something. Since many times personal pieces are done for you, sometimes it is not clear when you're really "done" with a piece. If you are a photo-realistic painter, this may not apply as you're done when it looks like a photo, but if you have a stylistic approach, this is oftentimes a bit more of a blurry line.

By forcing yourself to work within a specified time frame, if you're the type of person that needs structure, you can squeeze out some amazing stuff in a short period of time. While this does not work for everyone, if you find yourself being more productive when you're in a time crunch (procrastinators, anyone?) setting deadlines can be a really positive thing. It may even push you to experiment (for better or worse) in trying new techniques and mediums that you may not have thought about before.

However, if you're the type that does not create well under pressure, then deadlines can be very rough on you. The pressure to create and to produce can be overwhelming, so much so that even if you want to start early, you may find yourself psyching yourself out until the last possible minute when you realize that you don't have any more time to spare.

Sometimes you just don't have enough time to do your best work and you end up turning in something less than par, or even something that you're a bit embarrassed by. In these cases, we like to focus on that fact that as long as you do your best given the circumstances, you shouldn't beat yourself up so much. Like we've said before, as long as you take something away from every experience, it's not the end of the world. If you failed to execute an illustration in the way that you wanted to, you now know that given x hours, you cannot produce what you were trying to. You now know what does not work, so at least when a client asks you "Can you produce X in Y amount of time" you'll know how to answer.

Deadlines can definitely help push you to your best and to give you an action plan of prioritization for any project. But they only work if you set proper guidelines and boundaries and stick to them. In the end, time may be your worst enemy, but if you take the experience as an imperfect victory instead of a loss, you'll be all the closer to mastering the clock.

Don't Wait For Permission

You don't need this stamp.

Many times we wait for permission from some authority figure to tell us that we're good to go to start a project, or work towards our dreams. In short, we're looking for validation. While we are the first to admit that validation makes us feel all awesome inside and that our work matters and is that external approval that we're all after, it doesn't mean that it is necessary.

It is not necessary because whatever your dreams matter. They matter because they are your dreams. Whether you want to be a baker or a banker, a civil engineer or construction worker, an artist or an astronaut, your dreams are important. While you might be thinking that there are no objective reason why you should follow your dream, we say that there is. That reason is that you'll be happier.

Now this sounds like it may be a self-serving motive, and it may be, but by being happier, you'll make the world a better place. If you are grumpy and hating your work, you'll be a big downer for other around you. No one likes the constant pessimist/whiner/griper. While we acknowledge the benefits of venting and being allowed to complain (which we all should at times), dwelling on what is not working is like dragging a raincloud around with you that gets water on the floor and makes people's socks mushy - not fun at all. By following your dreams, you'll be much happier and that will pass on to the rest of the world.

If you are happy and totally crazy in love with what you do, it will show, and it will affect how you do your work. If you love to paint zombies, your zombie paintings are going to be much more awesome than if you painted flowers or puppies. Your work will appeal to other zombie fans and they will be happier because of it. If they are happier, they'll spread the happiness through their work, and so on and so on. Happiness is contagious, so unleash the happiness plague by doing the work you love.

Don't wait for others to tell you what you should or shouldn't do. If you have something to contribute to the world, then do it. If your heart says make a zine, then make one. If your heart says go into corporate law, then start studying for the LSAT. If your heart says you should travel to Australia to nurse sick wombats back to health, start shopping for plane tickets (and please send your photos to Monkey..he likes wombats). Know that your dreams matter, and go out and make the world a happier place.

Alien/ation - A Hyphen magazine/Paper Hat Production Art Riot Extravaganza!

Hey-ho everyone! As you probably know, Monkey + Seal also does business as Paper Hat Productions, which is our event organizing company. We're honored to be collaborating with Hyphen Magazine to put on their first ever Illustration show! Check out the details below for all the juicy info. We hope to see you there, and we'll be having a little table there with some of our stuff, as well as a bunch of new work on the gallery walls. Definitely say hi if you're able to make it!

ALIEN/ATION: An Illustration Show

Ever read an issue of Hyphen magazine and wondered about the amazing illustrations on print? Who is the artist and what was their inspiration? Hyphen magazine has partnered up with Paper Hat Productions to bring you a group show of game-changing illustrators and painters from all over the states in an Art Riot Extravaganza! Live painting! Drinks! DJs! Cupakes! If you miss this, you'll be kicking yourself the next day because this show is that special.

Saturday, July 10th

5:30 pm - Artist's Reception (free!)
7:00 pm - Art Riot Extravaganza

Space Gallery, 21+
1141 Polk St., San Francisco

$5 at the door
$15 includes a one year Hyphen sub (50% off!)

SPECIALS
First 25 paid guests @ 7:00 pm get a free copy of Hyphen magazine + limited edition mystery swag

FEATURING ART BY:
Danny Neece
Eve Skylar
Jon Stich
Jorge Mascarenhas
Joseph To
Kim Herbst
Rick Kitagawa
Rob Sato
Yoko Furusho


LIVE PAINTING:
Participating featured artists

DJs:
B-Haul (Dirty Dishes, Tasty)
Gordon Gartrell (Dirty Dishes) http://dirtydishesdjs.com/
EATS:
Vegan cupcakes by Black Orchid Bakery
http://www.blackorchidbakery.com/

www.hyphenmagazine.com
www.paperhatproductions.com

Having an Online Presence

image: (c) xkcd.com, image used without permission, but you should definitely check out the site - awesome comics!

If you want to get your work "out there" (and presumably viewed by lots and lots of interested parties), in this modern era of the internet, you have to have an online presence. If you google yourself, are you on the first page? Hopefully you are, but if you aren't, that is a goal you want to start working on.

Now you don't necessarily need to have your own website, but it's definitely ideal. However, if you don't have a handy-dandy web-editing program like Dreamweaver, you start talking html, php, xtml, etc., etc. and that gets costly either in education, time spent learning it, or paying someone to create your site.

Assuming you don't have the resources (yet) to build your own site, there are a lot of cool portfolio sites out there, but they don't offer a lot of customization. There's Coroflot, Carbonmade, deviantART, Behance, and many more, so definitely check them all out to see which one floats your boat (or create a portfolio on all of them - most of the big ones are totally free). You can also (less ideally) put your work up on blogger and keep it exclusively as a portfolio site.

Or, you can go to Escape from Illustration Island and check out this handy dandy tutorial to make your own portfolio site using Wordpress to make your own site. I highly recommend it, and wish that we would have read this before we built monkeyandseal.com. To give you a head's up on what we're eventually planning, we are going to eventually migrate to a wordpress-based site where our portfolios, blog, and shop are all nicely integrated into one big site. So if you can jump on the bandwagon of fancy wordpress users now, it's a great time to get started.

You also want to make a Facebook fan page for yourself. Ask your friends to like it and once you get to 100 fans you'll be able to get your own www.facebook.com/YourName url! Snazzy, plus you can use it to send our messages to people who you know are interested in what you're up to!

We also highly recommend keeping a blog. This way your audience can learn more about you, and hopefully through interaction, you can learn more about them. Blogger, tumblr (great if you like short posts or just photos), and wordpress are probably the three biggest blogging platforms that we know of, but there are a lot out there.

Really, the most important lesson to take away here is that it is all about finding your audience, and the only way to do that is to put yourself out there. In whatever form works for you, make sure that you are putting yourself and your art out there, as you are doing a disservice to everyone by not sharing your unique, personal expression with the world!

Any other good venues to explore? Please share 'em in the comments!

Rejection = Not so bad = Try again next time

Like most of us, there have been times Monkey + Seal have been rejected. Many of these times, it's not the end of the world. Even if you have been rejected, there's nothing wrong with rejection as long as you are using these setbacks as learning experiences to better your chances next time.

Monkey really wanted some Academy of Art University recognition, and the annual Spring Show is the best of the best of all student work. It is a juried show, with a jury that consists of both Academy faculty as well as outside professionals. Monkey, when he first started at Academy, decided he wanted to win Best of Show at one of the Spring Shows. He would have three chances to make it.

The first year, he submitted a portrait of Seal rendered in charcoal. Looking back, there were a lot of small technical mistakes, and those slight mistakes are the difference between Spring Show material and good student work.

The second year, he submitted a bunch of illustrations, paintings, and a screenprinted multimedia sculptural work to the Fine Art and Illustration departments. Out of a total of 10 pieces submitted, he again didn't make it.

The third and final chance, he submitted seven illustrations, a screenprinted book, and three paintings. One illustration made it, and his screenprinted book made it as well.

Monkey considers himself to be fortunate that he got anything in such a highly competitive show, but at the same time, he failed at winning the highly coveted and prestigious Best of Show Award. And this was it. After graduating, there would be no more chances of making it into the show, as only students are allowed to compete.

Monkey could have gotten depressed about the fact the failure, but instead he realized that his style of painting would never win any awards in a school that promotes classical realism. After some retrospection, Monkey really wanted recognition from an authority figure - and AAU happened to be the most authoritative figure at the time. So, Monkey has revised his goal - he'd now much rather focus on being featured in Juxtapoz, which is much more of his style, rather than trying to get a school that promotes a non-Monkey style to fall in with him.

Seal was recently reading a blog entry about Aaron Hartline, Woody and Buzz (Toy Story) animator for Pixar.

"The day I saw Toy Story was the day I knew I wanted to work for Pixar. Well, it ended up taking me 14 years to get my dream job. For a long time, I had a board so full of rejection letters next to my desk that they were literally falling on the ground because the pins couldn't hold that many papers layered over each other. But after a mile long of rejection letters, many demo reels, interviews that didn't pan out, and countless hours in front of a computer working on the next thing that might get me into Pixar, I'm actually animating a Buzz and Woody." - Aaron Hartline, Animation Tips & Tricks.

Keep in mind that no matter how bad you think it is, there's always a second chance, and many more after that, whether you can see it or not. As an artist, you have to constantly try and try again - rejection and failure are unfortunately a part of the livelihood of an visual artist. The thing is, you can't take it personally and you can use these as learning experiences as ways to step up your game.

Tugboat Print Shop

(c) Tugboat Printship, used without permission

Every once and a while, we stumble upon a piece of art that infuriates us. Not because it's against our beliefs or is so terrible, but because it's simply amazing. While browsing Printeresting.org, a fantastic blog on printmaking (and a constant source of frustration for Monkey due to it's awesomeness), we stumbled upon Tugboat Printshop. They make Monkey want to punch himself in the face as they're such amazing printmakers.

So the image above is frickin' amazing. The "Bonfire" print is a woodcut print. Yes, that's right, it's a four-color woodcut print. That means the artists (Paul Roden + Valerie Lueth) carved the image into four wood blocks, then printed them over each other to get what is basically a full-color image out of four colors (basically the way CMYK inkjet printers work, but involving a LOT more time, skill, and crazy crazy amounts of dedication and patience).

(c) Tugboat Print Shop. Used without permission.

This other print of theirs is from their "The Deep Blue Sea" series and is on our "we want this" very close to the top. Narwals! Great color schemes! Block printing! Gah, very awesome. In another fit of awesomeness that makes Monkey's blood boil, they even decided to build this awesome little cart when they travel to craft fairs and such to sell their amazing wares.

The Tugboat Print Cart, photos stolen off Tugboat's blog.

Anyway, you should definitely go check them out. Monkey actually gets pretty infuriated by their amazingness, so he has to take a break from looking at their work or he might hurt himself, thus, you know that they're great. Go visit them over at www.tugboatprintshop.com!