I needed a bit of inspiration, so I opened a book called 1000 Handmade Greetings and found a piece by Loi Luc.
I wanted to put in a credit to Loi Luc here (partly because he had a Vietnamese sounding name and I was intrigued about his back story anyway), so I done a quick search in the index of the book and found that, at the time of publication, Loi Luc ran a site called Catfish Greetings.
So, I went online and tried to find this, going firstly to the URL they gave, which was obviously www.catfishgreetings.com. To my great surprise, I found that the site is now home to a site subtitled “Weed News” and it hosts loads of pictures of sticky green.
Turns out that Catfish Greetings was once a shop in New York City, but has since closed, and that in the intervening time, a cybersquatter has taken over the URL and is now probably charging a ransom on it.
Poor Loi.
Oh dear, have you seen the programme called Catfish where people online pretend to be somebody else and deliberately hook others, usually to form a “relationship” and then string them along? Shows the worst of humanity and how the internet isn’t always a good thing. On a more positive note, I do like the red and green colours you’ve used to make this delightful apple tree.
No I haven’t seen this. Very appropriate. I do enjoy drawing with a limited palette – this one and the other one I done on the same day both used 3 or 4 colours. Simplicity is king
Interesting research and story. Tough world greeting cards. Like the name you’ve chosen btw.
I think there’s a lot I don’t get about the internet – or maybe about human nature.
Agreed. What kind of person decides to hold a handmade cards artist to ransom? This website suggests that the annual revenue was “less than $500,000. If it were me, I’d be mainly annoyed that the brand had been taken over after all the work that Loi put into making a name for himself.