Kittie Travel and Iliokai × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Kittie Travel and Iliokai is Keiko Mori's travel practice in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu. Keiko was born and raised in Tokyo and now guides as a state of Hawai‘i Official Tour Guide. The hinge of her story is an afternoon in 2017, when she met Kaimana, a Hawaiian monk seal pup, on Waikiki Beach and fell in love with the species on the spot. The practice has leaned seaward ever since; it supports Hawaii Marine Animal Response and leads an educational monk seal tour on Oahu. We read the Iliokai in her name as ‘īlio kai, the sea dog, an old Hawaiian way of speaking of the seal, though the reading is ours.
Her mark earns the study on its own. A geometric cat sits upright in faceted planes of burgundy and mauve, its narrow white eyes cut with vertical pupils. The tail rises at the right and curls inward at the tip. Beneath, rounded letters read Kittie|Travel, one vertical stroke standing in for the space. Geometry like this is already doing a stamp's work, since every facet reads as tooling before any tool arrives. The one obstacle was size; the official file is 150 pixels square, so we redrew the cat faithfully at press resolution and changed as little as the medium allowed.
The mark, as found
Pressed
Sangria follows the deep burgundy of the cat and its wordmark, while blush picks up the lighter mauve facets across the head and body. Black takes the gold foil. We did wonder whether those narrow white eyes would survive at tag scale, since a press likes to swallow fine detail; in the renders they hold, vertical pupils and all.
Waikiki, 2017
For the companion we drew a Hawaiian monk seal curled the way it hauls out on the sand, and set WAIKIKI 2017 beneath it – the beach and the year of the meeting with Kaimana. The seal is a general one, drawn by us; the story it points at belongs to Keiko.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're Kittie Travel and Iliokai and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.