Hey guys!

So I decided late last year that I wanted to move to the Dominican Republic to do missionary work. After visiting for three weeks this summer to check things out, I decided that I'm definitely doing that. I leave the U.S. Oct 19th, and my last day at work is this coming wednesday!

As a way to say goodbye to everybody here at work and to give them a remembrance of me, I've spent the past two weeks painting over my old unused business cards. 210 to be exact! Now I'm going to hide them all over the building so they can find them long after I'm gone.

The good news about my leaving is that I'll have alot more time to design for threadless and do freelance work now!

Here are the cards...

I just want to give you guys a heads up. I read on pitchfork this morning about a new compilation album to benefit aids. I bought it and it's absolutely amazing. It literally feels like all my favorite artists got together and made an album just for me.

It was so good that it made me post a blog. Check it out!

Dark Was the Night on Wikipedia

Hey guys! I just got back from Disney World again and I thought I'd share my sketches. I did two small books this time. I'm really in love with the small size moleskine sketchbooks now. Disney was awesome as always with so much to draw.

Also, a tip for artists who travel... if you need a good travel palette, an empty CD case does the trick. Just pull out the plastic guts and cover the front in stickers so that the inside is white (so you can see colors easily.) It worked for me when I lost my usual travel kit in the middle of the trip.











































Sketchbook #2

I miss mail. I get plenty of e-mail, voice-mail, and junk mail; but that doesn't seem to satisfy my desire for just plain old-fashioned, hand-written, white envelope with no see-through panel mail.

Nothing exciting happens in my mailbox anymore. I check it maybe once every two weeks, and usually I find nothing worth taking into the house. I pick up the stack, look through it for traces of something human, and when I find none it goes back in the box. I wish the mailman would just take it away, so it would never have to pass before my eyes again. Of course that never happens, and I'm left with this insatiable desire for REAL MAIL. Specifically illustrated letters.

So what's the point behind this rant? It's simple. I suspect that each one of you would also LOVE to get illustrated letters in the mail, and perhaps we could work out some sort of deal.

Send me an illustrated letter, and I will send you one back! Tell me about your hometown, or your dog, or a vacation you took, ANYTHING, as long as it's accompanied by some sort of illustration or design. It doesn't matter whether you think of yourself as an artist or not. Everything done by a human hand is infinitely more beautiful than 10 point times new roman accompanied with an oh so boring corporate logo and a jpeg of someone's handwritten name. Feel free to draw, paint, attach, collage, or whatever!

EVERYONE will receive an illustrated letter from me, and the person who sends me the coolest illustrated letter will also receive a book entitled "More than Words: Illustrated Letters from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art". It's a pretty great book.

Just email me at cbuchholz@jplprod.com and I'll email you back with my mailing address. You guys could also use this blog as a way to set up letter swaps with other threadless users!

Finally, I want to thank Danny Gregory and Jim Mitchell for inspiring me to do this.

Here's some inspiration from the book:

In a letter to his daughter, painter and illustrator Allen Tupper True embellished his hotel stationery to express his awe of New York city's skyscrapers. He included himself as a speck on the street.


Visionary artist and Baptist preacher Reverend Howard Finster wrote to curator Barbara Shissler about a trip to Washington, D.C., for the opening of an exhibition Shissler had organized at what is now the Smtihsonian American Art Museum.


Paul Bransom portrayed himself fixated on a photograph of his sweetheart. A year later, Bransom married Grace and sold five covers to "The Saturday Evening Post," launching his career as a freelance illustrator.


This is one in a series of letters from painter and watercolorist Waldo Peirce to a Women's Auxiliary Army Corps captain stationed in Louisiana during World War II. Peirce, who married four times, divided his affections among three women, each shown happily eating a piece of his heart.


In this letter to his parents, painter William Cushing Loring describes his neighborhood in Paris and the 72-hour Bastille Day celebration that was taking place there in July 1901.


The spectacular view that unfolds is from Rutherford Boyd's New York studio on the top floor on East 23rd Street, an area populated with artists at the time. Exacting illustrations such as this earned Boyd a strong reputation.


Moses Soyer sent what he called a "puzzle picture" to his son, who was away at summer camp. In a watercolor vignette, he pictures the family dog and cat and baseball great Dizzy Dean. The baseball glove was shown flying from his home in New York to his son's bunk at Camp Quannacut.

I just got back from my trip to Germany Austria and Czech! I had an awesome time. Drawing never ceases to amaze me in its ability to cause people to approach you. People just felt comfortable coming up and talking to me when I was drawing, and that's really great. I got to meet many really interesting people and had some great experiences.

Below is the sketchbook. this one is hand-bound on 140lb hot press fabriano artistico paper, which I tinted so it's off-white.

this sketchbook is kind of different from others of mine, since I really just kind of used it as a place to experiment and just have fun with.

sorry for the bad quality of some of the pics. if you're curious about what anything says, I can translate.

(if you have me as a contact in Flickr, you can ignore this if you want)

I know I haven't been doing any T-shirts lately, but I have been busy! My aunt gave me this old record book which was written in by my great great grandma. It has entries in it dated 1876! It mostly contains names of people who are "dropped" or "deceased". I decided to deface it with drawings from my trip to Italy that I took last year.

I was really kicking myself for not drawing when I was actually there, but this is the next best thing. Actually, drawing from photos does have some advantages, but it's not even close to the real thing.

Saturday I'm leaving for Europe again, and this time, I'm drawing while I'm there!

Here are the sketches...

I've been doing alot of sketching lately. I've been wanting to work on some individual paintings on canvas or watercolor paper, but when I think about starting I ultimately end up just working in my sketchbook. I think there's something about working in book form that has me addicted. It's also nice because I don't have to be cramped up in a studio to do it, I can work in my sketchbook anywhere I go.

Here's some of my latest. These drawings fill up the moleskine I had in NY...


















These sketches are for a journal I'm doing depicting dreams that I've had. This book has been really interesting to work on. At first, most of my dreams make no sense whatsoever, but as I sketch them and describe what happens in them, I start to see many recurring themes, and even reasons why I may have had the dream.

This dream was really cool. Speedy Joe actually made a guest appearance in this one. He was in the car with me when I was driving through the black and white town.







When I do the visuals for these dreams, I try to draw them in a way the best represents the way the dreams happened and were seen. this dream was very ordered, almost monotonous. The things that happened in it were horrific, but it was seen in a very cold unfeeling manner. That's why I represented it like this.




This one had alot of suffering animals in it. That seems to be a recurring theme in my dreams. It also had some incredibly random stuff that I still haven't made sense of.




Why is my old bowling ball stuck in this rapids? Why the abused dogs in cages?

I must confess that I didn't take any pictures while in NYC which is regrettable, but I did do some sketches!

It was such a great time! It was nice catching up with T-less friends and getting to meet andyG. I've been to NYC before, but I never saw it the way Andy showed it. So much cool stuff I didn't even know existed.

Here's the first sketch. just random musings whilst riding the train.


This one shows the first level of the bunny apartment.


Occasionally I would get up early and do my own little sketch tours of the city. The left side is from one of these. It was freezin cold though, so my hands were killing me and my watercolors kept freezing on the paper.


This one is stuff from the library and Rockefeller center. It was done really quickly so it's nothing great. I was drawing while we walked and therefore almost fell down the steps, but thank goodness phil kept warning me.


This one is animals from the central park zoo, as well as our good friend sir tenderloin.


This one is near cooper student union on an early morning drawing session.


This one is from the same morning. The kitchen in the bunny place was beautiful. The space was so small, and so simple.


Once we finally woke up we went to this spanish brunch. That was the best meal of the whole trip.


This drawing was fun to do. It was at this bar that looked like a pirate's hangout or something. They had skulls above the bar, huge vaulted ceilings, broken yellow orange lanterns, and tilework everywhere. The drawing throws out the majority of perspective and just kind of follows my line of sight. I used candle wax to mask out the white.


This record store had cats sitting everywhere. This one plumped himself down right on the CD displays. Cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery were AWESOME!!


This was definitely one of the coolest places I've ever seen. It was established in 1854. Lincoln sat at the bar once, and hanging on the wall is all kinds of historical items, even a newspaper announcing lincoln's death. The artwork was done using a mix of watercolor, beer, and salt.



A lantern from Saigon grill, and lights from Bowlmor.


My last sketch, and the one that almost made me late for my train. Subway station at 34th and broadway.

LOL!! Check these out... pretty funny.

Photos of TV

I just got back from vacation at Disney World! It was the first time for my nephew and neice so it was really fun. Plus, you just have to admire the meticulous detail disney goes to in order to create a theme. I brought a sketchbook this time to cature some of it. I'm a big fan of the architecture especially.

Here's some of my sketches....