Apologies all around! I have been neglecting this site this summer. I’ve been busy on my other site, illustrating Phish setlists, and trying to get ready for a wedding in about 2 weeks. So it’s been waking up at 8 and treating this as a job, since it’s what I do all day. Summer started out without a hitch, I was doing Free Art Fridays, as well as The First Friday on July 4th (it was a weird one).
One of my favorite bands, Phish, started touring in July. As anyone who follows this blog knows, Summer= Phish related art. I even created a blog just for it. This year was nonstop phish art, in part because I’ve been illustrated every setlist of every show this summer, in real time, either by attending or listening to audio streams of the show live.
What started out as drawing random songs (which I’ve posted here in the past), and drawing their short setlist when they played on David Letterman as a challenge, kinda blew up. I posted it on my tumblr, which doesn’t seem to be visited much, and shortly after Letterman’s official tumblr account (Who knew he had a tumblr?) reblogged it, although by looking at the notes it seems not a lot of people follow it. I started doing the next few shows, and eventually someone retweeted it, and it went crazy from there. I was contacted by Phish.net about them, who allowed me to use their set notes on my art (which happens to be copywrited) and they even used them in their show recaps! I have the entire tour available for sale, and will soon start taking commissions for specific shows, possible as larger sized and hand drawn/colored. With the sale of these prints, a portion is donated to the Mockingbird Foundation, who provide music education to children.
Josean Rivera 