Toyhippo Art At Bishops

Happy blustery Sunday Portlanders. Last night, we hung a little section of Toyhippo art at Bishops Barbershop in the Pearl. Looks pretty sweet, at least compared to the mid-90's hairstyle photography they had in the space prior. The multi-panel piece is still for sale for $500 in the shop, as well as the 6 wood blocks for $15 a piece. Head down to NW 10th and Everett to get a bowl cut and check out the art. We're honored and lucky enough to have it right next to a Buff Monster illustration on the adjacent wall. Here's some photos below. 

Buy Stuff

Good news humans. You can now buy artwork, apparel, and merchandise from our site. It took a little while longer than we wanted, but we were able to finally get some of our swag on here for sale. If you take a look at the links column to the right, you'll see the BUY STUFF section where you can inquire about artwork for sale, our two Utow tees, and the Utow character rings for the ladies (or men with small fingers). The two tees in the apparel section feature the black event tee from our Testing The Waters exhibit, as well as the cyan blue tee that we also sold at the exhibit, but is not an event tee exclusively. Perhaps that made sense, just check em out. We have a limited supply left of the cyan ones so get one now. All purchases from our site directly uses paypal.

As far as the artwork for sale goes, currently we only have Toyhippo art pieces up for purchasing. We are working on getting Ohb and Whalington pieces up as soon as possible, so art from all characters can be inquired about and purchased.

Additionally, we've placed a link to our Testing The Waters exhibit under the CREATIVE section in the links column now as well. Definitely worth browsing if you haven't seen photos of the event.

I think that's it for now. Hopefully more updates to come when more art becomes available.

King Volt Magazine Exclusive

Super fresh art/apparel/sneaker site, King Volt Magazine did a cool little special on Undertow recently. Just had a chance to chat with them about the art show we had at Nemo, as well as our overall breadth of art and apparel. You can check out any of the entries on Undertow at their site, www.kingvoltmagazine.com. They've got all sorts of goodies to look at and browse. Make sure you check back here and at their web site because they'll have more Utow stuff coming up in the very near future.

Undertow Whaleshes You a Merry February?

New Stuff

Earthlings,

Just wanted to give a quick heads up that A. I've downed an entire bottle of champagne tonight working on Undertow, and B. the links section has been revamped a bit. Had a long discussion with a close friend last night about the direction of utow and so forth, and decided it's better to have our creatives split up based on project (art, design, print, etc...) instead of splitting it up based on each character.

I think this will be more conducive to viewers seeing Undertow as a whole and processing it by design style instead of trying to process three different characters at once. So to the right you should see Art, Design, Prints, and Apparel I believe. Who knows anymore after this much champagne.

-UTow.

Art & Concepts Book

A couple months ago, we wanted to throw together a small book with just some general ideas and concepts for new works of art. Most of the designs in the book were pretty much only in the computer, save for a couple that have actually been executed so far. The overall intention of this book was to actually get something in print that we can show to prospective galleries while making art for an eventual show. It's a little bit of a chicken or the egg kind of deal. I need to get art, but there is no show yet. I need a show, but I have no art. You get the idea.

The book was covered in a blue fabric-y (scientific term) material that we lasered the crap out of, and then to top it off we put pages in it for good measure! The first half of the book is a section with Ohb designs, and the second half features Toyhippo. We did use a double-sided matte paper that is honestly way too thick for this, but we had a box of it lying around so we put it to use. Having a nice inkjet printer and some hunnies around for encouragement helps. Also some vodka.

Check out the photo gallery of the book HERE. Or you can use the link on the right side of the page.

Diving Right In

Greetings!

So I guess this is the first official post on our new site. It's pretty exciting. Undertow has been a long time in the works and it's nice to finally get our feet wet (shameless). From concepting, to designing, to planning and preparing, it's satisfying to finally feel some accomplishment with how far we've brought it even up to this very undeveloped point. It seems like it took us a good half a year to even get our name and logo nailed down, and that all started two years ago. Yeah, there was a lot of staring at sketch books, mocking each others' ideas, crying ourselves to sleep, and overall exhaustion of creativity along the road to this point. But we wouldn't have had it any other way with how much that hard work has paid off.

We're already really busy with working on new artwork to come, as well as planning our first art show sometime in the early part of summer. We will make sure to throw out any new developments out on the blog here to keep our die-hard fans (yes I said it) posted. You can check out the links on the right side of the page for artwork of each character. More links will be added under the "undertow misc" section as more items are developed. I will be posting soon about our Undertow Art & Concepts book that we put together a couple months ago, and I also plan on profiling each Undertow character in an attempt to pull back the curtain on each of their qualities and personalities.

A facebook page is in the works as well, so make sure you are on top of that whenever it comes available and become a "fan" as they say around all the cool crowds, I've noticed.

I think that is all for now. Should be fun. Stay tuned for more and thanks for your initial support if in fact you do have any. If not, I truly apologize. Go make your own anti-aquatic animals and try to ruin our lives if it makes you feel better.

-UTow