Lifestyle
Our totally L.A. gift to you: Free festive phone wallpaper and wrapping paper by local artists
Welcome to our sixth year of free and festive phone and computer backgrounds created by Los Angeles artists. This year our designs were created by people who were in some way impacted by the fires in Altadena or the Pacific Palisades. For our loyal print subscribers (thank you!), the Dec. 7 issue of the Los Angeles Times will have these designs as prints you can use as wrapping paper. If you’re local but not a subscriber, go in search of a copy. The grocery store is a good place to check.
Download your favorite designs below and learn a bit more about the artists and what they love about their L.A. communities.
Find past versions of the project (and lots more free backgrounds) at these links: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.
Jess Miller
Jess Miller is a Los Angeles-born and -raised illustrator, designer and content creator celebrated for her vibrant hand lettering, whimsical characters and bold surface pattern designs. Her artwork appears across a wide range of products, from planners and phone cases to rugs, greeting cards and apparel, bringing her signature mix of color and joy to everyday life.
On community in L.A.: “Rooted in storytelling and playful detail, my work is deeply inspired by the plants, wildlife, and everyday magic of Los Angeles. Whether it’s the chatter of wild parrots in the trees or the golden glow of citrus groves at sunset, I find endless inspiration in the natural beauty of my city.”
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Austin Scott
Austin Scott is a visual artist, film editor and director based in Altadena who has gained renown post-Eaton fire through his large-scale public murals and black-and-white coloring-book style. From his joyful depiction of businesses lost in the blaze at Unincorporated Coffee Roasters, to a 30-foot-tall peacock inspiring kids to “dream bigger” at Alma Fuerte Public Charter School, Scott is dedicated to bringing smiles to people’s faces in the hardest of times through his art.
On community in L.A.: “In Altadena, community, creativity and diversity come together to create an incomparable synergy of vibrations that you have to be here to believe. Although our town has been through the worst thing imaginable this year, the strength and connectivity of the people here are unmatched, and indicative of what will no doubt be a collective rise from the ashes.”
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Julia Wolinsky
Julia Wolinsky is an illustrator and designer from Pacific Palisades whose vibrant, hyperrealistic watercolor drawings explore how memory and emotion live within everyday moments. Rooted in her family’s tradition of expressing love through food, her work celebrates beauty, detail and the unseen stories within familiar subjects. In addition to her food-centered pieces, she creates portraits of people, botanicals and depictions of everyday objects that reflect shared histories, rituals and the shifting nature of contemporary life.
After losing her childhood home in the Palisades fire, Wolinsky began illustrating her hometown as a way to process loss and rediscover belonging through art. Her work has been exhibited at the Brand Library in Glendale, the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles and the San Francisco International Airport, and has been published by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
On community in L.A.: “I grew up in Pacific Palisades and my husband grew up in Altadena. In a matter of hours we lost both of our hometowns. I got to know Altadena through him and visiting his family there. The Palisades was always a place I would often go back to and reminisce about what it was like growing up there. One thing I miss about both places is they have their own small-town feel and unique character. You just can’t easily re-create the feeling that you got being there. I wanted these patterns to capture their individual and unique personalities and remind me of the landmarks that I remember most from being there.”
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Download phone background here
Download desktop background here
Keiji Ishida
Keiji Ishida is an artist and a graphic designer currently residing in Joshua Tree. He uses repeated characters and motifs that often find their way through various mediums. His process is design-oriented while revealing the imperfections and efforts of the handmade.
On community in L.A.: “I grew up in Los Angeles, and the city’s rich diversity, incredible food, unique architecture and landscapes, and strong sense of community continue to inspire me. L.A. remains one of my favorite places and a recurring theme throughout my work.”
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Meagan Boyd
Meagan Boyd is a Southern California–based artist and poet whose work blends ritual, ancestral memory and celestial symbolism into luminous visual poems. Through handmade pigments, intuitive process and mythic storytelling, her paintings honor the interconnectedness of all beings and the sacred nature of everyday life.
On community in L.A.: “I live in Altadena, a tight-knit and resilient community that came together with so much tenderness and strength during and after the Eaton fire. I love how our neighborhood continues to protect its natural beauty and deep sense of belonging, determined to maintain its charm and care for one another through everything.”
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Lili Todd
Lili Todd is an L.A.-raised illustrator and ceramic artist based in Yucca Valley whose work reflects her inherently optimistic spirit and interest in folk art, traditional craft and risograph printing.
On community in L.A.: “The Los Angeles art community is what shaped me as a person and quite literally raised me. Having creative spaces so readily available across the city, including the Creative Arts Group pottery studio in Sierra Madre, Giant Robot gallery on Sawtelle and Remainders Creative Reuse store in Pasadena (to name a few), is a truly magical experience that I will be forever grateful for. Thank you to all the small businesses that make up L.A. — a city like no other.”
Download phone background here
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Srimoyee Acharya
Srimoyee Acharya is an Altadena-based artist whose work features whimsical designs showcasing nature, backyard wildlife, and pets. Her illustrated goods brand, Srimoyee Handmade, supports animal rescue groups, and she has donated nearly $15,000 since starting her business.
On community in L.A.: “What I miss most about Altadena is how much my community loved and cared for local plants and wildlife. Neighbors put up ‘peacock crossing’ signs at intersections to protect the flock of nearly 40 peacocks that lived down the street (this flock is still residing and thriving!), and many gardens were filled with native plants and flowers.”
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Lifestyle
Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective
Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.
“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”
The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”
L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.
The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.
Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.
“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”
A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.
The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”
Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”
The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”
The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.
All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.
Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.
Lifestyle
Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Lifestyle
Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
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