hand mailed!

i received this letter yesterday in the mail & i thought it'd be interesting to share it. it is a solicitation from a local mortgage company. the first thing you'd probably notice about it is that it is written in chinese. i get tons of mail like this all the time from companies who have a chinese rep who will send me solicitations in chinese. i also get phone calls all the time, mostly from phone or cable companies who immediately begin speaking to me in mandarin. it is interesting to me how they determine that i might be fluent in chinese! it makes me wonder how companies group people together based on their last names... how many people will get letters from this company in spanish or hebrew or french or german or korean or japanese or another language? it kind of boggles the mind. this kind of solicitation probably works great if you have just moved to this country & can barely speak a lick of english! too bad i am not in that demographic.

anyway, i can speak mandarin but my reading & writing are pretty bad. i am pretty sure the letter is wishing me a happy (chinese) new year & telling me about their awesome financing plans that are great for (chinese) people.

what really impressed me about this letter though & the main reason i chose to share it is that the signature is HAND WRITTEN! holy cow! how often do you see that in a cold solicitation? i always closely inspect the signature & at best it is usually a printed signature in color. it is rarely, if ever, done by hand. i wonder if this person is hanging by the telephone wondering if i'm going to call. a hand signed solicitation really makes that much of a difference to me as a consumer. it shows that time went into what you are getting. if i needed a mortgage & was on the fence about this company & another i'd probably go with this one based solely on that. i'm sold!

i am a firm believer in the personal touch... i will personalize pretty much every order i get in my online shop. i'm not trying to get people to take loans out or sell them houses, i just think it is important to let someone know that you really appreciate their business & you really love what you are doing which i do. i usually try to spruce up mail i am sending to friends too. i am always proud of the packages i mail out just like, as silly as it sounds, i bet this loan officer must be proud that he signed his letters by hand. you can always see me beaming in line at the post office with my pile of decorated packages. if you order something from me i want it to be a pleasant experience... a nice decorated package to be waiting for you at home after a long day at work & what you ordered along with a nice note inside instead of a plain package with an invoice inside. there's a time & a place for that & it's certainly not from buying stuff from me. i try to throw something extra in, usually a button, but sometimes i'm in a bind & getting your package in transit sooner trumps getting a little trinket with your package which might arrive a little later.

this is getting harder & harder every year as i get more & more orders. i am planning on begining to screen print standard designs on my envelopes & print stickers for my mailing tubes instead of decorating them one by one by hand. i know this isn't the same as doing everything by hand but i hope it doesn't take too much away! they'll be hand printed! however, i don't think i'll ever stop writing handwritten notes... i guess this is the first step in going corporate, huh?

they're back!

they're back! people kept asking for them so i printed out another batch. so... you'd better buy them! 8 bucks for a set + shipping & handling. i have a 2nd series coming out soon. these koalas are all part of the steam city koala lucha libre association down in koalatown. someday it'll all make sense...

product review: sanford magic rub erasers.

have you ever gone to the store to routinely buy something & that something was not there? maybe you figure that the store is just out of stock so you decide you can just come back another time. but the next time you go back it's still not there... & you start to get suspicious. you go home & see what's going on on the internet (because you don't have an internet phone & never want one) ... and it turns out they have discontinued your product! this happens to me all the time! it is the worst feeling ever. it happened with polaroid film, postum, print gocco, and dilberitos, the dilbert brand vegan burrito. (to be honest, i don't miss the dilberito that much, i just wanted to mention something that didn't begin with a 'p.')


so imagine my fear when going out to a routine stationary run a few weeks ago i couldn't find yet another thing anywhere: magic rub latex erasers. i went home & it seems that magic rubs are not in danger, but i'm still pretty nervous. i have been using magic rubs for many years (since the june of 2003. i bought my first magic rub at a stationary store in berkeley, ca in june.) & they have become my primary 'big eraser.' i can't imagine life without them! (my middle eraser is a pentel clic eraser and my fine eraser is the papermate tuff stuff eraser stick which replaced the pentel z2-1 refill erasers around 2004 when they changed the formula and started being made in china.)

first off, let me mention that 90% of my drawing process is erasing. i am a bit of a perfectionist & if something isn't perfect, i erase it. this tends to leave paper quite ragged after repeatedly erasing it for a few days. prior to trying out magic rubs i used the pentel hi-polymer erasers, those erasers with a paper sleeve & that cool 80's graph paper design. i have basically been using these since childhood. they are an excellent eraser for doing clean erasing, my one problem with it is the effort you have to exude to do a good job erasing. if you don't hold your paper down well enough you end up with a big crumply mess. this is bad news if you've been working on something for a long time. i resisted the magic rubs for many years because i didn't think they could hold a candle to the rad look of the pentel hi-polymers. they were so plain and drab looking! however, i have since learned my lesson. the magic rub does just as good of a cleaning job if not better but with much less friction. i can recklessly erase anything and the soft latex will gently react. the erasers don't last as long as the hi polymers but it still takes me a really long time to go through a single eraser, especially if i have one at home & one at my studio. and they're made in the good old usa.

while things being discontinued can be a bummer, the worst is when they change things up on you & don't really bother to tell you! this happened with my small eraser, the pentel refills. one day i was drawing & routinely replaced an eraser & it didn't do a good job at all! i tried another one... same thing! it was horrible. it took me about a year to find the papermate tuff stuff eraser stick. i hope they never discontinue that or skimp on the quality! it's always sad when the quality of something unexpectedly goes down. it's happened to me with annie's mac & cheese (smaller net weight), national brand engineer pads (no cardboard back, poor grid alignment) & who knows what else. i would gladly pay a little more to get something of a better quality & it makes me sad when companies think they can get away with it. you will never buy something from my shop that'll make you feel like that! unless i end up selling it to like hallmark or american greetings. hey, a guy's gotta eat!

what do you think of lasik??

i am going to be taking a small break from freelance work for a bit to work on some upcoming salty merchandise & comics. i'll be accepting work on a limited basis though so feel free to be in touch about projects but also please don't be offended if i happen turn you down! it's nothing personal, i'm just trying to make time for myself.


the last project i just finished was a fun blog header graphic for one dr. maayan keshet's new blog, eye-spy. maayan is an eye doctor whose brother happens to be my best pal, yair. maayan can fry up some ridiculous potato pancakes! maayan is also famous for painting a mural on the second floor of J hall in lexington high school! however, i haven't been to my old high school in many years so i am not sure if that mural still resides there. they redid a lot of the school in the early 00's so perhaps not.
anyway if you have any eye concerns, perhaps the answer resides in her blog. it's relatively new but i have already learned that carrots aren't as good for your eyes as i was made to believe & the eyelid is evolution's super advanced version of a squeegee!

product review: pilot precise rolling ball pens, 5 mm & 7 mm

the other day i was at the stationers' when i decided to try out the pilot precise rolling ball pen series. i've been thinking of trying them out for some time but i didn't want to change the whole system i had going. i guess i just never see a point in changing when you have a good thing going.

for pens my two standbys are the uniball vision & the pilot p-500/700. both pens are great pens, the vision is a rollerball pen & the pilot p500/700's use gel ink. both pens are made in japan & claim to be archival. i usually use the vision to go over pencil on my roughs & then the pilot when i am doing my trace-over with my lightbox on a new piece of paper. if i'm doodling i prefer the needle tip of the pilot to the pointy tip of the uniball. it has a nicer balance to it as well.

i would use the p-500/700 exclusively if it could trace over pencil better but because it is gel ink it doesn't really soak into the paper so when you erase pencil markings a good amount of the ink usually goes along with it making your line very faint. you usually will have to go over it again which is both a pain & can often compromise your line. when i bought the pilot precises i was hoping to maybe find a rollerball alternative that wrote like the pilot gel pen. this would really save me a lot of time because maybe i wouldn't always have to draw things over 3 times (pencil, rollerball, trace over with gel)!

the pilot precise has a needle tip which is similar to the pilot gel pens. in fact, i think pilot is supposed to have some patented needle tip technology that they often advertise on their packaging. so far i am having positive experiences with it. it draws great! i like the weight of the pen as well as the line it makes which is similar to the pilot gel pens but a little looser. in many ways i like it more than the gel pen. probably the biggest argument against using this pen for art is that the ink is not archival. i'm not sure how much this matters in the digital age, especially in my process where most everything i draw ends up scanned on a computer anyway, but it's nice when you do something & you know it's not going to eventually turn your paper brown even if you probably won't be alive to see it happen. another small problem i had with the pen is that the ink flows quite liberally so if you stay in one spot and are applying pressure you have a good chance of bleeding through the paper -- especially if you are not using bristol board or a thick stock. this shouldn't be a huge problem unless you are drawing on the top of a pad! i definitely wouldn't draw ruled frames for comics with this pen unless i was feeling gentle as a surgeon or i had a good solid 2 ply bristol board.

all in all, i'm going to switch over from the uniball vision to the pilot rollerballs because of the tip of the pen. i often find myself having to clean the tips of the visions because they tend to somehow get ink all over them. after a long day of inking the fingertips of my left hand will be black from rubbing ink off the tips of the visions. a non archival alternative that doesn't make that much of a mess is a welcome addition to my inventory, especially if used primariy on rough drafts. i think i will continue drawing final pieces on a clean sheet of paper with the gel pens because they are archival & i always seem to miss erasing that one line of pencil & it's a pain to deal with when it's all scanned in the computer. two kinds of pilot pens?? if i bought stocks now would probably be a good time to invest in pilot!

funniest thing since lawyer cat.

hahahahahahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahaha!

this is like that time we played 'follow that bird' with the sound off & played that whitesnake album.

reject read posters.

please excuse the temporary blog banner...
i'm trying to draw something original for it but nothing has seemed quite right yet!

i spent all day yesterday trying to remember what html i had forgotten & sprucing up the online store. if you go to www.saltykisses.com now you'll automatically go to the online shop. this is just an attempt to kind of streamline things. i also spent about 3 hours yesterday designing & coding that nifty rollover menu. when you roll over a link it'll change color! was it worth it? i am not sure.

anyway, after doing all that boring programming yesterday & a lot of kind of laborious drawing today, i decided to have a drink tonight & frankenstein together some reject READ posters. these are dedicated to all the people who have told me i should just slap the word READ on whatever i make... it won't work!

enjoy...

'dammit lennie, why'd you have to kill curley's wife??'

this one could say 'Read: CPR Books.'

this one just makes me laugh but i am not sure why.