zach & abby

i recently had the privilege of designing a wedding invitation for another dear friend! my husband matt's long time BFFAELYLASWTFBBQ, zach, moved to LA a while back. he's been pursuing a career in film and has since fallen in love with an astrophysicist named abby (um, hello?! how badass!). they're both super into their cats and floated a "cats in space" themed wedding invite... YAAAASSS!! the cats are based on zach & abby's cats, and one is showing off a pulsar flag on its space suit. i swear, i wikipedia'd pretty hard and i still don't understand what it means, but i'll try to take comfort in the fact that i'm good at other stuff. the most crappy thing about this is that silence got her first fever/virus the weekend of the wedding and matt had to change his plans to go at literally the very last minute. i wish we all could've been there to celebrate with them.

anyway... i had so much fun designing and painting this! i hope you enjoy it! just thinking back to those sunny april afternoons stealing an hour or so to paint while someone else watched the baby! mmmh! more like that, please! i have this amaaaazing idea that when silence starts sleeping more through the night i'll actually start to be able to get more creative things done again. i hope that's true.

uncommon goods licensing project

a couple of people from uncommon goods found my booth at the national stationery show in may and asked if i'd be interested in licensing some of my work to them. we spent a couple of months discussing which designs to license and what type of products they could see making with them. i was really excited to find yesterday that the final products are live for the constellation font i designed! i love that everything is made in the USA by artists like meeee. click the images to link to the products!

thanks so much tiffany for all of your help making this come together, and for working with me in spite of my crazy busy work schedule!! this is so cool!

mondays and birthdays

today was matthew's 30th birthday. his company gives him a lot of PTO (grr, jealous), so he planned to take day off and go to record stores, rock climbing, see the new james bond... so for about a month i've been secretly scheduled to work tuesday through saturday this week to be able to spend the day with him today and this morning over breakfast i let him know! this was after pretending to be all bummed about having to go to work, of course. we had such a fun day checking out instruments at sam ash, perusing records at sorry state downtown raleigh, and enjoying a matinée showing of spectre. now i'm going to practice harp and head out for my weekly lesson, matthew's going rock climbing, and we'll reconvene at home later to bake a chocolate cake and probably watch x files!

photobooth pics from the ace hotel in nyc this may after NSS

pop up market

i did my first pop up market last saturday at my favourite local coffee shop, sola. it was pretty fun & about 10,000 times less stressful than NSS! i reeeally need some kind of display shelves for such markets, but that's going to have to be a project for another time. there's another pop up market today at the same coffee shop and i'll be in attendance with the same display. wish me luck!

update on things & stuff!

i'm looking at my website and my collection of work and thinking, things have seemingly stopped... but they haven't really... let me catch you up on happenings since my last post in june (wow, june?)!

JUNE...

i dyed the ends of my hair blue.

i spent about 3-4 days hunched over my kitchen table like a mad scientist building the hypnocube. it mostly works :).

i got knocked up. due march 26, whaaaat! we just found out we're having a girl. excited to meet her!

JULY...

i painted some custom lettering for a licensing agreement (stay tuned...i'm supposed to know something very sooooon on that!)

i got a big promotion at work... i now lead a team of photolithography engineers and technicians.

AUGUST...

i have made a few etsy sales here and there along the way (up to 24 total, yay!!), despite my lack of effort to promote my work. i'm so glad someone is finding it and loving it...you guys encourage me so much even if i'm silent about it on the internet!

SEPTEMBER...

a store in michigan (rail & anchor!) spontaneously found me through etsy and placed a wholesale order!!

i dyed the ends of my hair purple.

i think that about takes us to the present. i'm slowly getting a giant belly, i'm still playing harp, still teaching piano, but i've lacked the energy and time to paint for TYLRE. i have so many ideas, i can't wait to put them into tangible form and share them... i've just got a lot of other crazy stuff going on right now and haven't been as energized or focused.

ETSY STORE IS GO! I REPEAT, ETSY STORE IS GO!

well! my etsy store exists! creating it was a bit more time consuming than i anticipated, and i'm not thrilled with how i set everything up (need more tags, details, etc...)... but i'm thrilled that the shop is live and i'm excited to tweak it and improve it in the weeks to come!!

some other cool things happened this week... i shipped almost all of my orders from NSS, i reordered a bunch of cards to restock after aforementioned order-shipping, i had a phone conference with a company about licensing some of my work (i'll let you know if that becomes a real thing), oh and i caught up on some of my work at my real job and i don't feel as much like i'm completely behind and will never catch up!! so yeah! GREEEAAAAT!!

buy some cute cards, please! --> https://www.etsy.com/shop/tylre

hypno(toad)cube

after i package & ship all my NSS orders i'm going to reward myself by assembling a hypnocube from this kit. it feels like just the right summer project. i have never soldered anything so this should be a real joy. hopefully i can find some strapping young man from work to lend me a soldering iron...

anyway! check out the video! wonder if this delightful gentleman comes with the kit?

"good for a party, i suppose" - going to request that they put that on my tombstone.

NSS - little update!

I had such a good time at NSS... Thank you everyone who came by my booth and gave me positive feedback and encouragement! It's waaaay outside my comfort zone to be the center of attention AND to have to sell myself...and that's basically the position I put myself in for 3.5 days - and over something as extremely personal as my art. I'm really lucky my husband came with me to be my hype guy and keep my spirits up when I wanted to run away because my shyness/social anxiety started getting the best of me. Hanging in there was so worth it, though. I am so excited to have my work in stores across the country! I made some great connections and I can see so many opportunities to share more of my art with people in the future! We're getting back into our (new!!) normal routine in NC. For example, yesterday we went to the farmer's market in the morning and got Indian takeout for dinner (old normal), and this morning I woke up and found an email order from NSS in my spam folder in my inbox, so I adjusted my spam filter settings and ran upstairs to package that order (new normal)!

thanks to the delightful doreen (http://www.bobanduncle.com/) for the picture!!

NSS setup day 1!

i should start by noting that day 0 involved a 13h travel day from raleigh, NC to NYC to unload the van, and then to doylsetown, PA to stay the night with my cousin and his family. they fed us a great home-cooked meal and we had a fun miniature jam session around midnight before craaaashing. anyway, that was a lost day. it's behind us now.

FRIDAY! friday really was day 1. we woke up in PA and enjoyed an extraordinary homemade cappuccino before heading down to fred's breakfast club for some grub. guys. fred's breakfast club. i wish i could adequately describe how fun it was... or just how nice our few hours spent in PA were. it was just the lull we needed between stressful packing, driving, unpacking, and setup!

after breakfast, we took the NJT from trenton, NJ to penn station in NYC and dropped our stuff off at our hotel, then it was off to the javits! we got a couple of coats of paint on my walls, assembled our ikea "table" and i blocked out the mural i'm putting on my back wall to lure people into my booth. we got all of our friday setup goals accomplished in a reasonable amount of time so we rewarded ourselves with lots of sushi & sake! CELEBRAAAAATE!

everything hits at once

this past weekend i worked reeeally hard to get every painting finished, scanned, dust and cat fur removed (oh. my. god.), and uploaded to the printer! a marathon painting and scanning day sunday, an entire monday spent in a coffee shop overhearing terrible conversations, a sore wrist from attempting to use the mouse pad instead of an actual mouse for the first dozen cards, and one (ok, three) minor meltdown later... everything has been uploaded! the lady at the print shop said i should be able to review proofs as early as thursday this week! i am so anxious to see the final product you guys. YOUGUYS.

in the meantime, after i get home from long days at my real job (you know, the one that pays me?), i'll be resizing images for a catalog to take to NSS and an online store (launching in june)! here's what that looks like:

analog lyfe is hard / happy accident!

do you think anna bond ever drops her paintbrush and ruins her paintings, or is that just me?

i was painting and talking to my mom on the phone the other day, trying to multitask, and i dropped my freaking paintbrush... it rolled out of my hand and over my paper and got paint eeeeevvverywhere essentially ruining this thing i'd been working on little by little for two days. i was so annoyed with myself for being so clumsy, but i have absolutely no time to dwell or grieve with my NSS prep work! MUST. KEEP. MOVING.

i immediately started re-painting it, and you know what? it looked so much better. i fell more in love with the design. i even cranked out a few more similar designs to fill out my line for the stationery show! so, yeah...! for the next few days i'll be finishing my last few paintings, getting things scanned, and uploading files for my very first proofs! AAAAHHHH!!!

the dream becomes the nightmare

WELP! last night i had my first NSS nightmare... i got to the javits to set up my booth and my walls were already built, but my back wall was the wall of a house instead of wood. in the middle of my rear wall there was a huge fireplace. the floor was extremely old hard  wood and was sloping downward toward the fireplace. i stepped on the floor to test its stability and the beams sagged and separated and gave way under my feet.

we complained about this to our across the aisle neighbors, but they wanted no part in voicing or resolving the problem... jerks... we tried moving my booth forward a little into the aisle to get the drooping floor behind us, but it didn't work. and then i woke up. problem not solved.

you're a lizard, gary!

happy monday!!

my friend kathryn texted me a couple of months ago asking if i could do a painting for her husband josh for his birthday. "you're a lizard, gary!" is one of their inside jokes because they're extremely adorable people. anyway, this is what i came up with. it made me really glad. i hope it makes you glad as well.

and now back to your regularly scheduled NSS preparation freakout...

shirking all our responsibilities yesterday was really great

the stars aligned just right yesterday - the weather was magical: blue skies & warm & sunny & breezy... AND matthew and i both had the day off from work! we headed to downtown durham and had ourselves a fucking DAY OF FUN IN THE SUN.

lunch outside at the fed (avec mimosa!), coffee & browsing at parker&otis, pit stop at a friend's house to help her move some boxes, duke gardens to lay in the sunshine and listen to the wind through the trees and strangers talking about cameras, fullsteam for three rounds of delicious beer (working man's lunch for me! NOM) while enjoying the company of a myriad of characters including some kind of terrifying giant white bird companion, a beyond adorable corgi puppy who made me rethink everything i thought i knew about how little i want a dog, and some really delightful women who asked us to play the board game clue with them. after replacing the empty parts of our bellies with beer we headed over to pizzeria toro and stuffed our freakin' faces with a sublime kale salad & one whole pizza each. we watched the first 30 or so minutes of the movie clue on netflix before FALLING. ASLEEP.

that was so much fun! but now back to work...i have a list of 24 cards i still need to paint by the end of this month, only 8 of which i've actually started! still have so many logistics to figure out! aaah! the joyful stress of trying to do something you love!!!!!

friday after work

a friend called me out of the blue a couple of weeks ago and asked if i'd be interested in playing/singing the theme song for his friend's tv show airing live on a local public access channel (and eventually the internet)... and naturally i was like, sure! i can probably hack that! so this friday after work i drove to chapel hill and played a song in front of a couple of cameras and about 20 friendly, happy faces...and guess what! it was really fun! alex and his guests are funny and stuff but my favourite part of the show was ella and jordan's dreamy performance at the end.

anyway, i promise not to let fame change me.