A lot of people assume I went to art school or that I grew up making art. I didn’t. Rather, I grew up wanting to be a writer. From third grade through college where I was an English and French major I was obsessed with writing, but the truth was I never felt like I … Read More
Creating artwork for Little Hippie has been on my list of ‘cool jobs I’d love’ ever since I bought my first shirt from their booth at Berkfest 2003 in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. This adorable shirt had a picture of Taylor’s Grateful Dead bear and terrapin holding hands looking into the sunset. I wore the … Read More
A few days ago I finished a tour poster for Dead & Company that will be released on November 14. I worked on it throughout the month of October, just after I had the pleasure of attending AdobeMax, Adobe’s “Creativity Conference” where they bring the design community together annually to awe and inform us with new products. … Read More
Next year, 2016, will be the twenty fifth anniversary of the much-too-soon passing of famed poster artist Rick Griffin. Like too many good people, he lost his life in a motorcycle accident in Petaluma, California. He was truly a California Nature Boy, surfing his way up and down the coast. Surfing led Rick to illustration, … Read More
Here at Little Hippie we’ve been on a mission to dive into the origin story and evolution of the hippie – where did this culture come from, what does it mean and what are the values of that we’re passing onto our little hippies? Persians, Greeks and Germans were at it way before anyone thought … Read More
So, you ask, “Why the owl? And what’s it got to do with the Grateful Dead? These are questions I’ve been hearing a lot. The answer is, it has a little to do with the Grateful Dead, and a lot to do with me. The first iteration of my owl was born in the fall of 2013 while I … Read More
Our fearless leader and artist in chief Taylor Swope was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal as part of their coverage of the Grateful Dead Fare Thee Well limited edition posters. For the grand “Fare Thee Well” finale in Chicago, the band commissioned nine different posters and two triptychs (consisting of a three inter-connected … Read More
As an artist and designer of one of the official Fare Thee Well posters, Little Hippie’s Chief Executive Artist Taylor Swope is among the lucky few who will be attending all of the final Grateful Dead performances – last weekend in Santa Clara, California, and this weekend in Chicago. Taylor’s official Fare Thee Well posters, previewed above, will be for … Read More
“Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley always claimed that they photocopied that book, they didn’t, they cut it out with a pen knife. So this is not that copy,” Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas G. Meriwether told us, looking over a medieval era art book (right) on view at UC Santa Cruz, “but that’s the way they got … Read More
We’re catching up on Michael Hamad’s piece Deadhead Scholars, Fans Marking 50 Years Of Grateful Dead: On the scholarship front, several new books about the Dead, some of which draw upon records located in the Dead Archive, will hit the market in 2015, including Peter Richardson’s cultural history “No Simple Highway”; “Deal,” a memoir by Bill … Read More