A friend of ours opened a nifty shop recently where one can go and do things like rent sewing machines, learn knitting, buy yarn, or get lessons in screen printing. I took Noah in for a screen printing lesson. I’ve never done it, either, but it turns out it’s much easier than the way I remember my mom printing political signs and banners when I was a kid, where she’d have to exactingly cut away film from a screen. We used a photo emulsion technique that made the process go much faster, and cleaner. I didn’t take pictures of the printing session itself, but here’s a progression from drawing to t-shirt:

Noah’s sketch of a boy, a book, and a grouchy cat:

Noah holding up the emulsified screen with the light shining through so you can see the design:

and, the final print as shown on my t-shirt. The finer lines didn’t come through as well, but the cat turned out great, especially the added stripes.

Anyways, it was all great fun, and we’re already plotting a collaboration to do next time.

Noah has arrived for his annual summer visit. A month earlier than usual — which is great because the weather’s nicer, and less sticky. So far.

Today, as is our tradition, we spent his first day in Iowa City at the bookstore, local awesomeness, Prairie Lights. We had high octane and chocolate milk, and Noah read Naruto comics while I read the New York Times.

Noah kept exclaiming how cool the Naruto was, and I had to comment, honestly, “Your Manga is way less depressing than my New York Times.” So maybe I should go back to just reading comics.

someday I’ll learn how to scan these better.

a sketch I did from a damaged photo of my mom circa 1970..this was before I was on the scene. I can’t tell if it’s college or High School, I’m guessing it was her short-ish stint in College, but I’ll have to ask. She would have been about 18 here; she was 19 when I was born.

I promise to post something other than drawings soon! I’ve been really trying to make myself practice so it takes up a bunch of my evenings, and also the drawing is a great way to decompress, and I’ve been needing to do that a lot lately! August was a bizarre month, mostly for other people, but boy, I was right there with them.

Also I want to eventually do some auto-mytho-comics soon, but first I need to get a little better with drawing the comic versions of my parents, and myself when I was small.

This drawing is for my friend Shelly who is moving soon to Germany, to work with Allanimal. The fact of how we all know each other is odd. I’ve known Allanimal since High School, and became pals with Shelly completely randomly while volunteering at a local used bookstore. And she knows Allanimal because she is friends with his partner, Jeannette. It really is a tiny world.

Anyways, I’ll miss Shelly a great deal, but this move is so awesome, and I’m very happy for her.

w00t!