Ten Decades and Counting Book Cover

I had the absolute privilege of designing a book cover for my grandpa’s autobiography this spring. He turned 104 in July and he’s been working on his autobiography for a few years with some help from his eldest daughter and a few of us grandkids.

My grandpa, Kenneth, was born in Missouri in 1920. He grew up during the Great Depression and served in the 106th infantry division in WWII where he played with the USO band. He met my grandma by chance at a USO dance. She also served and was a nurse. They were married for over 75 years until she passed away at 102 years old. They raised 4 kids together. And when I say together, I really mean it. My grandpa was more hands-on as a dad than so many men from his generation and I know it made an impression on the kind of father my dad was/is. I’d like to think it even influenced what kind of dad my husband has been to our kids.

With his heavy background in music, my grandpa taught music, band, orchestra, and more in Kansas public schools for decades and was inducted into the Kansas Teachers Hall of Fame in the 1980s.

One of the tasks I was more than happy to help with was editing and cleaning up the photos from my grandpa’s life; photos of varying ages and conditions. We knew that any photos printed in the book would be in black and white, so I was able to clean up quite a few photos and converted any color images to grayscale. This is definitely NOT a specialty of mine, but there are a few I’m quite proud of.

Correcting photos with silver oxidation was a new one for me. Many thanks to YouTube for a few different techniques.

My grandpa is the kid on the left with his brother and his dad, my great-grandpa.

My grandparents in the 1940s.

Top left: my grandma with my Aunt Sue and my dad. Top right: my grandparents with their 4 kids for some kind of “family of the year” photo shoot. Bottom left: my grandparents when they got married. Bottom right: my grandparents in Bali in the 1980s.

For the book cover, my cousin Chris and I had a handful of photos of my grandparents together that we decided between. We agreed that this one worked best for the cover. I love how they aren’t looking at the viewer and it feels like an intimate moment between them. I love the look in their eyes and how my grandma is messing with his jacket button. It’s a perfect pose that shows me how in love they were without looking like it was posed. Honestly, I don’t know if it was a posed photo, it may not have been.

For the cover design, I wanted to isolate them from the background, but I didn’t want the background to be empty either. After cleaning up as much of the dust and spots and noise in the scanned image as I could, I played with some different blurring effects and colors. In the end I’m really happy with how it turned out.

My cousin Chris, wrote the blurb for the back and we were able to get it published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.

My grandpa’s book is available for purchase on Amazon if you want to order one. CLICK HERE to buy through my affiliate link.

Utah Taekwondo State Championship Poster 2024

My kids and I have been students of taekwondo for about a decade. My oldest and I both have our 1st Dan black belts and my youngest will test for his this spring. You can read about my TKD journey here and here.

I have done a lot of graphic design work for our studio over the years too. My taekwondo master is involved with the Utah State Taekwondo Association and last month she asked me to create a poster for a state championship tournament.

My boys and me from 2018 and 2020.

We haven’t had a state tournament in Utah since 2019. In 2020, all tournaments were cancelled (remember that pesky pandemic?). Then, when tournaments started coming back, USA Taekwondo changed things up. They created regional Grand Prix tournaments that were required for athletes to qualify for Nationals. This essentially rendered our state tournament moot.

Martial arts tournaments are expensive to run and difficult to organize, so I get it. Why put on a tournament if we don’t have to? My kids competed in 2022 because our West Grand Prix was in Reno, NV (driving distance for us) and Nationals was home in Salt Lake City. Last year, we opted out of taekwondo tournaments because they were in Portland, OR and Jacksonville, FL. That was more expensive travel than we wanted to do.

USA Taekwondo has decided that our state tournament can be a qualifier for athletes who want to compete at Nationals… they just have to win gold or silver in their event(s). Awesome news for our athletes and even more awesome for athletes who want to get a little tournament experience, but want to have to travel to get it.

Back to the poster…

I did a quick Google search for taekwondo posters to see what others have done in the past. Most have photos of taekwondo athletes and since we haven’t had a tournament since 2019, I didn’t want to use old photos. Instead, I searched through my own photos of athletes from our studio at various events over the years and turned them into cartoons using Procreate on my iPad.

First I made a save-the-date graphic. I didn’t even know the tournament venue yet!

These are the two photos that I used for this first graphic. I took them at a sparring event we hold every few months at our studio. The first photo is of my son sparring his friend attempting to kick him in the head. He missed, haha!

I drew the athletes on separate layers and exported them separately so I could move them around independent from each other. This allowed me to make my son look a little larger and more proportional to his opponent, who’s like six inches taller than him. It also let me adjust the two girls sparring so Irene is making better contact with her opponent.

Oh, the random stuff that went through my head when creating these… including having to put them all in long-sleeved, white uniforms, gloves, and competition footwear called Daedo socks.

Most tournament posters feature sparring athletes because, let’s be honest, it’s one of the most exciting events to watch. Now that I know more about other events, like poomsae (forms), I enjoy them, but sparring always draws the most spectators.

Even so, I wanted to include more events, so off to my photo archive I went. This is the final poster once they figured out a venue and the little details:

Here are the various photos I used:

I snapped this photo at the 2018 state tournament of one of my instructors, Master Samy Moras as she competed in nunchucks. I was still learning the right settings for shooting indoors, hence the motion blur. She composed a YouTube video about that tournament you can watch here.

This photo is from the same state tournament of my friend Liam, doing a flying side kick as part of his board breaking routine.

A fellow student, Breanna demonstrating the black belt form keumgang in last spring’s black belt test. She was testing for her 2nd Dan black belt.

A former instructor, Logan doing a beautiful flying side kick during his 2nd Dan black belt test a few years ago.

A fellow student, Mirai, demonstrating poomsae during her black belt test last year.

I’m pretty happy with how the final poster turned out. I even managed to redesign the Utah State Taekwondo Association logo to something a bit more legible. Their old logo used a tough font to read and it never actually said “Association” on it. It said “Championships.” That redesign was tweaked even more this week to the final logo below:

What a fun project to work on! It was really soothing working in Procreate on these drawings and having fun with the folds and wrinkles of the uniforms. Plus, I was able to take my iPad with me to the trampoline park when my kids had a play date.

Now the most pressing issues: Are my kids going to compete? Am I??? My kids have done it before. They’ve competed in sparring, poomsae, and board breaking. I’ve never competed. I’ve never wanted to spend the money or stress about having to learn and essentially cram new poomsae in a short period of time. So we’ll see.

Two New Stickers

I added two new stickers to my shop this week.

The first one is a line I saw from a friend a long time ago. It’s always a line that has stuck with me growing up as a woman in this world. This is the first time I’ve opted to try for a glitter border too and I think it turned out pretty cool. The sticker is 3x2.5 inches and durable vinyl.

The second sticker is a quote I read a while back from author Glennon Doyle and it’s one that I really relate to.

I will have plenty of these stickers in my booth at Draper City’s Art in the Barn on August 25 and 26 and possibly Draper’s Int’l Arts & Crafts Festival too.

Also remember that any sticker purchases include a free 2x2 inch circle sticker of Sundial Peak. You can read about that one here.

Land Beyond Zion at Winter Break

Over winter break, my family spent the Christmas holiday with my sister and her family in southern California. We drove there from Salt Lake City. My husband was only able to take off one of the two weeks from work, so as we headed home from SoCal, we dropped him off at the St George Airport and stayed in the southern Utah area for a couple of days; specifically Land Beyond Zion.

Land Beyond Zion is a fun campground/vanlife spot right on the UT/AZ border. Shanti has built out a beautiful place to camp comfortably with flush toilets, running water, an outdoor shower and claw foot tub, WiFi, and a shared outdoor kitchen. It has multiple sleep options: from BYO tent, RV, or van with full hookups to a canvas platform tent (with heater!), an RV, or a tiny house. There’s a lovely spot with hammocks hung, and a play area for kids. She has plans to continue building more amenities and dogs are welcome!

Kicking myself for not taking photos of the structures she’s built; mostly on her own too!

My oldest with Shanti’s dog, Sunny

It’s 30 minutes from Hurricane and 50 minutes to Zion National Park. It’s 20 minutes from Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. It’s super close to Gooseberry Mesa, about an hour to St George, and 90 minutes to Bryce Canyon National Park. It’s a wonderful basecamp to all kinds of outdoor exploration and adventures.

It actually rained most of the time we were there, so we did no hiking, but it was still fun and relaxing. We had no pressure to actually do anything… and we kind of didn’t. We played a competitive round of Phase 10, we chilled in hammocks, and we slept in; even thru an epic sunrise that Shanti was gracious enough to share a photo of.

One rainy afternoon, I attempted to paint that beautiful sunrise in watercolor and made a video of the process. You can view it here. At the end of the day, I couldn’t get my paints to make that peachy-pink sky (at least not at the vibrance I wanted, so I did another one after I got home in gouache. They’re very different, but I love both for different reasons.

As the rainstorms cleared and we headed home, we stopped at the Cinder Knoll trail in Hurricane to take photos of the Pine Valley Mountains with snow and Red Cliffs Desert Reserve in the foreground. The puddles were serendipitous.

Check out Land Beyond Zion on its own website, but also on AirBnB and HipCamp.

Shanti is hosting two retreats for adults this spring; one at the end of April that is hiking and running focused with Kathy Pugh. Click here for info about that retreat.

She’s hosting another at the end of May with amazing photographer Michelle Craig. Click here for info about the May retreat. If I didn’t have other stuff happening at the end of May, I’d be attending Michelle’s retreat!

Also… I love the logo I designed for Land Beyond Zion. It really turned out awesome. I’ll write a post about that on its own at some point.

I Bought a Mat Cutter!

One day, 20-ish years ago, my BFF Yvonne knew I was looking for a job after being fired from the last one (long story there). She came over and wouldn’t leave until I filled out an application to work at the picture framing store where she was a manager. She knew I would love the work, and I really did. I alternated between full-time and part-time, depending on my school schedule, for about five years at a Bay Area chain called Corners.

For the first few years, we did everything in-house. We cut and joined frames, cut mats, stretched canvas, built shadowboxes, we did it all. I learned how to lay out and cut multi-opening mats. I learned how to sew down an antique christening gown or an autographed football jersey without using any tape or glue. I built shadowboxes for military medals, antique coins, musical instruments, and even a few license plates. I stretched canvases that were up to eight feet long and cut frames to fit. It was such a FUN job.

The sales side wasn’t always fun; especially with customers who had no idea how expensive custom framing is. But my favorite times were the weeks leading up to Christmas. We’d have hundreds of orders to finish before the holiday, so we’d get overtime approved, crank up the music after the store closed, and get it all finished without interruption. I have lots of fond memories of singing and dancing and making some wonderful friends.

I have thoroughly loved framing different things for my home. I may have old, cheap, and mis-matched furniture, but there’s never a shortage of framed photos and artwork to hang on my walls and lots of artwork and empty frames waiting for a larger house to adorn someday.

Last Christmas, I splurged and bought myself a mat cutter. A few times I paid way too much at JoAnn’s for a custom mat to fit a ready-made frame and it was so difficult to justify paying that much when I knew I could do it myself. Of course, my house is small, so I don’t really have anywhere to put it other than the floor of my office/studio.

First thing I cut a mat for??

I framed Kukkiwon 1st degree black belt certificates for my son and myself. We worked our butts off to earn those and they deserved to be displayed with pride.

The next things I cut mats for were my own paintings and prints for my exhibition at Draper’s Art in the Barn, Draper’s Internationals Arts & Crafts Festival, and the Sandy Visual Arts show. Being able to buy full sheets of mat board and cut all of my own mats proved to be a huge money-saving tool.

My knowledge and skill allowed me to cut mats to fit ready-made frames and save on custom framing AND have complete control over how they looked. When I chose mat colors for the exhibition and arts & crafts show, I kept the mats off-white and simple.

When I chose mats for the Sandy Visual Art show, I went with black to really make the colors in the paintings stand out; even though it’s wasn’t necessarily mat colors someone would choose to hang in their home.

I am SO glad I bought this gift for myself. I have so many pieces of artwork I bought from other artists I follow and I cannot wait to get matted and framed.

Next goal: Get a new house with a bigger studio/office space so I can have a whole table for my mat cutter.