Cannabis Hug

Meet the cannabis man. He grows cannabis, not marijuana. Sadly, I’ve come to learn that that term is rooted in racism, like many drug names in the early 1930s that were centered around fear and control or anti-drug propaganda. So I like to call it cannabis or weed or flower or bud. I think it's important to expunge the term marijuana from my lexicon. So, instead of calling it marijuana, I call it cannabis, and I'd encourage you to do the same. After moving to California, I’ve always wanted to try growing my own but never had the opportunity to truly immerse myself in the worldwide weed.

Like all things plant-related, I have an affinity for growing my own food, and cannabis is no different. Anything that I can plant by my own hand and give love and life to is consequently better and more controlled than anything I could buy at a store. Growing cannabis has blossomed into a new hobby of mine over the past 3 years, and I’ve loved learning about it.

I first started when I decided to pick up a pack of seeds from a local dispensary. The pack was an indica variety named Persian Triangle. I'm not really sure where the name came from, but doing some googling, it seems like it would fit well in foggy San Francisco since it was grown in the mountains of Pakistan. Indica, typically from what I've read and experienced so far with growing, likes more temperate weather and can tolerate colder conditions than its sunny relative variety: sativa. Regardless, I still love cannabis and wanted to make a print out of it!

I got inspiration from Gillian Wilson, who made this super cute character hugging an alligator, and was like omg what if I make a little dude floating on a cloud hugging a giant cannabis leaf!? So instead of an alligator, it is a giant cannabis leaf. I used the reference image from Gillian Wilson's “Hungry For Hugs” illustration of a person hugging a green alligator.

So I grabbed a big leaf from one of my plants I grow, and drew a character standing on a cloud in flip-flops smoking a joint and hugging a giant cannabis leaf. This one also started out as a sketch on paper, and then I scanned it in and traced it in Illustrator.

Oftentimes I do feel like I am hugging the plant that I love so much. It helps my stress level go down and creates my very own feeling of floating on clouds. It's quite lovely. This was my first actual print where I explored 2 colors, plus a fountain, which is mixing two colors together so they create a gradient effect.

At first I struggled to get the emulsion applied and the screen burned. But after two or three trial attempts I was able to finally get the cannabis man on the screen with his leaf and cloud. Even though the registration was a bit off, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I am looking to do another batch soon to figure out the registration so the colors align better, and maybe on smaller paper.