About the Print: Hau

Hau. The Hau is an amazing flowering shrub tree that has always intrigued me. It has scraggly crooked branches with heart-shaped green and white leaves with some solid in color and some spotty. It grows in a sort of horizontal fashion with its twisted, crooked branches intertwining to form a jungly mass. It is such an intriguing botanical specimen as a whole, but it is the Hau’s blooms that fascinate me the most. The Hau flower is a true hibiscus, but to me it’s definitely not a typical one. The blooms can get pretty large, and they make a beautiful canopy when they fall or are blown off their branches and litter the ground. In order to capture my interpretation of the Hau flower, I made a return to opaque pens as my drawing utensils. I wanted to make something bold and substantial, and with my skinny pencil I was just drawing everything too small. The size is reminiscent of our classic Seaflower print, which was also drawn with opaque pen, but it has its own unique look, and by adding my own version of a Cheetah-ish print, there is also a certain playfulness to it. It’s fun and sweet and a little bit sassy at the same time.