Q & A with Allison Cole

Welcome to the first in our series of artist Q & A. Allison Cole recently completed The Tour Diary for us and took some time away from making art to talk about travel, life after RISD and getting drunk on an airplane.


Do you travel much? Any trip in particular that stands out?

Not as much as I used to....now most trips that I take are just hopping on the train down to NY. When I was in college I had the opportunity to spend 6 weeks in Rome, that was a pretty amazing trip!

Are the drawings in the book based on personal experience? (like have you ever gotten drunk on a plane to relieve flight anxiety?).

I always get drunk on a plane! I am the worst flyer ever, I hate the whole experience!

How did you come to have the character style you use in the book and in your comics as a stand-in for more realistic drawings of people? When it's based on someone you know, how do you figure out what you will change about the character to make it look more like that person?

I really don't know how it all started, it wasn't a deliberate effort to start drawing people like that, it just kind of happened one day. Guys are a little harder to define with details than girls, but it's usually an accessory or something that really reminds me of the person.

You are focusing more now on cut paper for your art shows. What brought you to cut paper instead of doing drawings?

I think that all comes back to my printmaking background and my complete inability to paint. With printmaking you have to come up with an idea and then break it down to layers and flat color. I tried painting that way and it didn't work out too well at all, so I turned to the cut paper and it all just made sense from there.

The Tour Diary is drawn mostly with a tablet, right? How has using a tablet changed your art, if at all?

I love drawing with a tablet and working in Illustrator for illustration work, it is so much more time efficient than scanning drawings into Photoshop. And you can really zoom in and get down to the details. I don't think I could ever draw an entire graphic novel with a tablet, but for certain purposes it makes a lot of sense.

Besides drawing comics and doing paper cut art you also make wallets and bags for your online shop called Bang! Bang! You're Thread. When and how did you start crafting?

I've been sewing and stuff like that for years...I became involved when I started participating in RISD student sales (they put together about 2 a year) local Providence-area craft shows and going to comics conventions. Pretty much the whole experience of selling self-published comics at these events and to stores opened my eyes to all of the fun things I could be making! And the internet and having a website really helped too.

You went to RISD and still live in RI. What is the art community like there and was that a part of why you wanted to stay? It seems like a lot of people who went to RISD are involved in the craft community or world of illustration in some way and I guess I'm just wondering what's in the water there? Or is it just a coincidence? At this point in your life is RISD even a factor to you or just part of your bio?

I loved every minute of RISD, it is a small school and Providence is a small city. Most students lived in off-campus housing, and as a result that connected us all more to the city. All of my closest friends are still my friends from school, RISD really brings together a great community and a great group of people. And Providence has super cheap rent!

The Unbearable Absence of Garfield

Another tip from Russell Etchen, Garfield Minus Garfield photoshops out the titular character in the series and leaves its human protagonist in an existential, schizoid crisis. As any cat person can attest, this is not too far to fall. This interpretation would have been helpful when casting the movie - Breckin Meyer as Jon Arbuckle misses the desperation that would have been great for Jeff Goldblum to take it to in terms of neurotic physical comedy.
What is it with Garfield as this generational icon? I don't know what he represents to Generation Y other than sloth and solipsism, or as just a stand in for '80s nostalgia. He is all over the PaperRad DVD on Load, and I have seen semi-ironic love for Garfield on oversized Tshirts in Portland and in the Bay. As a youth, Garfield was one character that i loved to draw because he fit such an easy formula of repetitive circles. If forced to draw something spontaneously on the spot, the pattern for early '80s Garfield is hardwired into my neurons and unfurls through my hand with less thought than my written Chinese name.

SeriPop tshirts for Zum

Montreal's design and silkscreen posse SeriPop were kind enough to design this Tshirt for some illicit objects (records okay?). We met Chloe and Yannick when they came to Oakland with their band AIDS Wolf, who rule.
US / Canadian relations have been tense of late - SF's own NRSZ got held up at the border for some reason unknown to me, but we can bridge the friendship border with some of youse out there purchasing this Can/American collaborative Tshirt, printed by Emeryville-based YesPress.
This is also a promotion for the label that Yvonne and I started, Zum. We have done a few shirts in the past but this is the most elaborate design so far!
These are available in the Valencia Street store, along with a few of the super limited (only eight!) American Apparel tote bags pictured here, sans the Ben Grimm color scheme. The shirts are printed on mint Fruit of the Loom cotton.

back from SXSW

I find myself sick upon returning from Austin. After a long layover in Las Vegas, talking to a girl freaking out that her medication is swelling up her ankles. It's a mirror to taking the red eye from Oakland to Houston, where a woman on the plane starts swearing and moaning in pain, saying her eyeballs are going to pop out of her head from the pressure (much as I picture Arnold Schwarzeneggar in Total Recall looking like a squeeze toy). So I caught something, surely, if not just a psychosomatic hypochondria from these drama queens of the skies. A cough that moved its way all around my head systems so now my eyes are overproducing their eye fluids. Sorry for the imagery.
Was it worth it? I actually found this SXSW, my third, to be the most enjoyable. Perhaps because I was not constrained by job obligations this time around, the pace seemed easier. Nothing blew me away but then again I was happy to have my expectations low and met.

When I first arrived Thursday morning, I took the bus to meet up with my friend Russell, who is starting up the Austin extension of his Houston bookstore Domy. We run into each other at APE sometimes. Russell used to book shows in Houston, but he's happily given up the music game to concentrate on running the store and gallery. It's a pretty raw space right now, but he was talking about a possible Gary Panter signing. Seems like Austin is ripe for this idea, no one is doing quite what they are doing. It's also in an old liquor store across the street from a soup kitchen and a block away from a methadone clinic.

After getting some food with Domy's owner Dan, we ended up at Mrs. Bea's outdoor Todd P party. I saw the much-discussed and thankfully lived-up-to-its-hype Ponytail from the excessively-hyped Baltimore music scene.

The guitarist used to play in Ecstatic Sunshine and I had seen the drummer before when he toured with Ultimate Reality. I could barely hear the singer and she was standing comically distanced from the rest of the band. They tore it up though. Ecstatic Sunshine played immediately after and were drastically different than last year when they were just duelling electric guitars. This time around it was just the red-haired guitarist with two accompanying noise makers crouching low, one of whom was hitting a drum pad. Gowns were next and they brought along Yasi for the trip which was a pleasant surprise. Yasi and I are in a band called Walt Disney with a rotating cast of random Bay Area people, mostly Tomo (Tussle), Cora (Tarpita Fleisch), Jorge Boehringer (Core of the Coalman), and Steve Santa Maria. It was nice in the first five minutes or so of arriving at Mrs. Bea's to see familiar faces from all over like Jessica Espeleta, Jim Smith, Fred Thomas, Karen and Todd, and the Meneguar dudes...
The rest of my time will be described on my new blog, entitled Californiageddon in honor of New Bad Things...

the Jeremy Tinder journal is here!

We just got our first box of journals today and they turned out awesome!

LO artists at SXSW

I don't know about you, but seems like everyone and their brother's going to SXSW this week! Or maybe it's just because my brother is going. My brother George of the dashboard postcard also has his hands in many pots. He's playing with his band KIT at several shows, hosting a party for his PR company Higher Publicity, and promoting the new release by Scary Mansion on his label zum. Look for the busy Chinese guy with glasses and say hi!

You can also meet up with and purchase some great posters from LO artists Dan Black & Jessica Seamans (Landland) and Jason Munn (The Small Stakes) at Flatstock. We actually just got a nice batch of Dan's posters in the mail today! His work is awesome and we are super excited to be collaborating with him on volume 3 of the LO Annual weekly planner!

we heart Landland's posters

a new project with Jeremy Tinder!

Our new journal with art from the funny and talented Jeremy Tinder is in the process of being bound this week by our friends at 1984 in Oakland. Here's a sneak peek at the cover layout...



We'll let you know as soon as we get our sweaty little hands on them! And on the nice mail tip, Jeremy sent us this awesome paper cut-out thank you. We especially dig the graph paper hair. Thanks Jeremy!



Check out Jeremy's solo show this month at Chicago's rotofugi. "Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Banana?" features 200(!) paintings which you can check out online if you're not in town.