Artful Dodgers: Season 1, Episode 1 — “Sho Time” with Hailey Ramos

On the eve of the 2025 Home Opener, I’m thrilled to welcome you all to the big blog debut of “Artful Dodgers,” an interview series designed to introduce you to some of the many incredibly talented creatives out there making World-Champion-caliber Dodgers-themed artwork. If you or someone you know makes Dodger art, please get in touch!

In accordance with Doc and the Front Office’s wishes, we’re leading off this series with a little Big Sho in the form of an absolutely incredible risograph that I recently acquired at the 2025 edition of the LA Zine Fest (LAZF) at the Broad Museum.

Moments after entering the event I locked eyes with the image you’re about to see — at first, a fleeting glance of a familiar face peeking through a throng of admirers huddled around him like he was Mona at the Louvre.

Suddenly, the crowd dissipated—allowing me a fully unobstructed view of his full, magnificent splendor, and even more crucially— a chance to purchase it.

Behold and marvel, dear readers, at Hailey Ramos’ absolutely brilliant Sho Time:

As you can see, I had to have it. The only real question was: would Hailey agree to be the VERY FIRST artist EVER to agree to answer my questions for the blog? Let’s find out!

ITFDB: “Sho Time” is the kind of piece that feels like it had to have been crafted by a Dodger fan—are they a big part of your life?

Hailey Ramos (AKA @Alohamisery):

Certainly! I’m probably the least athletic person in my whole family, so my connection to baseball doesn’t show through in my knowledge of the game or keeping track of all the stats— I leave that all to people like my younger brother, whose Little League games I grew up attending.

Los Angeles Dodgers culture is really what I resonate with. I was born and raised in LA and I remember thinking in preschool that “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was our song and other teams had to sing something else, since I was taught that you were supposed to sing “root, root, root for the Dodgers” as loud as possible. It was also a friends-and-family tradition for me to go to Filipino Night at Dodger Stadium for a few years! I have a few giveaways as souvenirs.

I also love the camaraderie among the current Dodgers. They have such fun personalities together—Freddie, Mookie, Teo, and Kiké come to mind for me. This makes them a great team to watch from a teamwork and culture perspective, not just from a technical one.

¡Te amo, Teo! He is one of my favorite Dodgers in a long time, he just radiates happiness, and his rapport with Shohei is must-see TV. Speaking of, were you able to stay up for any of the Tokyo Series?

I was lucky enough to be in Tokyo for the exhibition match between the Dodgers and the Hanshin Tigers just recently, and it was so interesting seeing the sea of Dodger Blue without the loudness and rowdiness of Chavez Ravine…!

Wow. I can’t fathom how cool that must have been. It feels like literally ALL of Japan is showing up for Sho and the squad, and I am loving every moment of it.

I think this print would be BIG in Japan because it perfectly captures the euphoric Sho Mania moment of the now, while also giving off vintage Japanese Menko baseball card vibes from way back then. Can you take us through some of your influences? 

For [Sho Time] in particular, I was definitely inspired by Japanese baseball cards, as well as other old-timey baseball cards and Japanese woodblock prints. I thought risography would be a great way to capture this texture and quirky misalignment, so this design was riso printed by the lovely LA-based printers at Never Press!

As for my other influences in general, I’m inspired by music, graphic novels (like the Scott Pilgrim series and the works by the Tamaki cousins), and cool outfits. I’m lucky to be friends with so many amazing artists, and sharing stories and feelings about creating art with them is such an effective motivator as well.

Risograph printing is a technique I learned a lot about from attending LAZF. I was drawn to their silkscreen-esque print quality and like you mention, the potential for happy accidents and perfectly imperfect alignment issues. How did you discover Risography? Was there much of a learning curve?

I was first made aware of risography by artists I followed on Instagram! I’m mainly drawn to the texture and working out how different ink color combos will look. I was intimidated to start looking into it because lots of art spaces need you to take a risograph workshop in order to start using their machines, and to this day I still haven’t gotten the chance to do that myself…! But it was pretty easy to learn how to get my digital art files set up to be ready to print (you can learn anything on YouTube).

The composition is suitably heroic, you really nailed his pose, but what seals the deal for me is how you’ve captured Shohei’s immense sense of joy for the game, and his towering, larger-than-life essence.

Do you have any tips or tricks you could share for helping aspiring illustrators to help them better capture a subject’s likeness?

Don’t be afraid to use references! Take pictures of yourself in silly poses and clothes, browse through Pinterest, and/or Frankenstein a bunch of different assets together to find the look you’re going for. I learned in my first high school art class that drawing is more about seeing the relationships between things, rather than replicating the individual components, and that’s something I still take to heart. For this print, I referenced individual pictures of Ohtani and Decoy, stitched them together, and played with the proportions to fit my art style. Experience will help you decide what to emphasize and how to simplify, so just keep on drawing!

I’m glad you mentioned Decoy references. I feel strongly that every self-respecting Dodger fan should have their own version of a Decoy moodboard. Could he be any cuter? Are there any other special dogs in your life?

Decoy is the cutest! He has such a sweet face. I’m totally a dog person, but I’ve unfortunately never had pets of my own (besides some fish). If I had to choose special dogs in my life, they would probably be Tony, my cousins’ smart and well-behaved doodle, and Arare, a fluffy and spoiled Akita that I don’t know personally (because she lives in Hokkaido), but have a lowkey parasocial relationship with on Instagram.

I’m a huge fan of hand-drawn lettering in general—but the more expressive and illustrative, the better. Your treatment of ‘SHO TIME’ stopped me in my tracks. It feels like skywriting, or that the impact from his insanely loud home run has somehow left the message like a jet vapor trail. Was that sort of what you were going for?

Honestly, I just wanted to give the impression of clouds or field dust, kind of like the background of the awesome Ohtani mural in Little Tokyo. But I love your interpretation so much more! I also love experimenting with hand-lettering in my illustrations because I feel like there are very few typefaces I’ve discovered so far that complement my artwork. So drawing my own is the solution! It’s such a cool way to combine illustration and design. 

And as a final note on type, I thought I’d give you the honors instead of Google Translate, can you tell our readers at home what all the Kanji says?

For sure! Decoy’s saying “wan wan” written out in hiragana, which is like “bark bark” in Japanese! I think it’s cute that in Japanese, people will affectionately call dogs “wan-chan,” kind of like how we call dogs “doggy.”

The rest is just Ohtani’s name written out in Kanji. The first two are “Ohtani,” which I think means “great/big valley” (using my limited Japanese vocabulary). As for the characters for “Shohei,” I couldn’t tell you what these mean without help from the Internet…but I’ve read that his name means “soaring boy.” It’s cool that the same name in Japanese, when written with different characters, can mean something different!

Sort of like how the same character can hit and pitch and… okay that was terrible. Moving on…

Please tell us more about Hailey, starting with your pen name: “Aloha Misery.” To an outsider, the juxtaposition of “paradise” that aloha implies, along with “misery”  is at once provocative, memorable, and indicative of a wicked sharp sense of humor. I’d love to hear the Aloha Misery origin story!

Alohamisery is actually an anagram of my name! When I was a kid, my uncle and I sat down one day and ran a bunch of family members’ names through an anagram generator just for fun. “Aloha misery” was the coolest result for mine! I was a Polynesian dancer for 12 years, so the “aloha” part caught my eye.

The initial “oxymoron” impression is very tongue-in-cheek, which is probably my favorite part about it: I’ve been told by an art teacher that there’s something tongue-in-cheek about my art. But I also like that “aloha” can mean so many different things, with “hello,” “goodbye,” and “love” being the most common ones. I think “goodbye misery” is the most surface-level optimistic interpretation of my name, but “hello misery” and “love misery” are equally important to consider.

The full gamut of human emotions are important, and we can’t pretend to be happy 100% of the time. We need to welcome and embrace the sad moments to fully appreciate the happy ones. It might sound corny, but it’s the truth!

It doesn’t sound cheesy, in fact, I couldn’t agree more. All the best stuff is just playing with contrast to create value: art, design, comedy, photography— even music is just sorting out where the highs and lows (and even the scooped mids!) should go to convey the desired message or feeling; rhythms built up from repeatedly mashing up silence and sound…

Speaking of music, I see and feel music in your art: there’s an infectious rhythm, groove, and tone to all of it. I know that personally I can’t create much of anything without a soundtrack while I work. Are you the same? What’s on the Aloha Misery playlist?

Absolutely! I love this question because music is my number one art influence in general. I love picking song lyrics or song clips to post along with my art that go with what I drew.

I could go on forever about music I like listening to, so I’ll just say that some of my favorite songs of all time are Everlong by Foo Fighters, Luna by Smashing Pumpkins, Sober to Death by Car Seat Headrest, savanna by OnlyOneOf, Stream by Last Dinosaurs, and Hana by Fujii Kaze.

So which song should we post for Sho Time?

The song I’ve picked for this print is Tokyo Reggie by Masayoshi Takanaka! It’s a funky little song about summer coming and reminding you of all the dreams and exciting things that the future will bring. I think it’s a perfect song for baseball season!

Music clearly moves you (and Tokyo Reggie is a complete jam) but movies do, too. I know this because I was also fortunate enough to have picked up a copy of your zine “The Pickle.”

Admittedly, I hadn’t even heard of “An American Pickle“ when I chose this zine— I just really, really, really love pickles, blackletter type, and neon pink… so I knew grabbing a copy would be a safe bet— but what I got was so much more than the sum of those parts. Enough baseball, it’s time to talk pickle.

“The Pickle” is an incredibly thoughtful and deeply honest bit of autobiographical introspection as much as it is a “Fil-Am” review zine. While I’m not a Filipino-American, I can empathize with feeling an ‘apparent disconnect’ with the wildly differing facets of my own heritage. I too have felt adrift or out of sync with my ancestors hopes and dreams, especially given some of the immense challenges they faced and sacrifices they made— did you find crafting this zine therapeutic at all? 

It was extremely therapeutic, especially since I made the initial draft at a zine-making workshop for Filipino American History Month, and sharing stories with all the other Filipino American creatives there was so inspiring and uplifting. “The Pickle” wasn’t really the first iteration of this story, either—in my senior year of high school, I submitted a drawing for art class with a very emotional, almost stream of consciousness-like artist statement.

The earthquake that I mentioned in the zine had just happened, so the emotions were still fresh, and I also hadn’t seen “An American Pickle” yet. When I made “The Pickle” about five years later, those emotions had settled into something I could reflect upon with a cooler head. I think both versions have their own unique impact, and it’s amazing to see how time influences the way you look at the same event. What details or feelings did you forget? Which ones were powerful enough to remain?

“The Pickle” proves that you have a great command of “putting yourself out there” in your work — but how difficult was it transitioning from creating “for you” to literally putting yourself out there at Zine fest?

I’m kind of a perfectionist to a fault, so I wasn’t willing to sell anything that I wasn’t 110% proud of. At the same time, I didn’t want to sell anything that didn’t have an audience. It was a little bit of a balancing act trying to make stuff that both LAZF-goers and I would enjoy, and I think it comes down to what image you want to project for yourself. I wanted to say, “Hey! I have cool illustrations/designs and original stories! This is stuff you couldn’t get from anyone else.” This made me tend toward selling originals that might resonate with other people’s experiences (like the perzines and the print I made of my characters sharing a beer, hehe), and I made sure that the fan material I made (I had zines about Chiikawa, Pokémon, and the movie Harold and Maude) included my own personal perspective. That way there would be a more tangible sense of purpose to what I was selling. 

I wish more businesses would consider these variables before putting things into production or out on the market. It seems like so much stuff is just made without being critical about why, and how— just cheaper, faster instead of better, more sustainable… clearly you get it. Have you popped up at many similar events, and are there any other events on the horizon?

LA Zine Fest was actually my first time tabling at a public event in 7~8 years! As an introvert doing my first solo table experience, I thought it was going to be scary socializing and doing customer service for six hours straight… but I felt that because I was talking about creating and all the stuff I was proud of making, I was in my element and actually getting energized! I’m definitely sending out applications for more events, and I’m planning with my cousin, who makes adorable clay trinkets (on Instagram @pekabu.co), to do market appearances together!

I am shocked that this was your first solo show, I can attest that you were certainly in your element and I’m glad LAZF was such a positive experience for you. What have been the biggest challenges and biggest learnings from it?

For me, the prospect of having to spend money (to print up the inventory to sell, and paying the table fees to participate) to make money (selling at artist alleys/markets) was the most daunting part.

I didn’t have sufficient income as a college student, as I was trying to save as much as I could before graduating, so I didn’t look into getting prints and zines made until I had a higher-paying job after college. It was also tough because in order to get accepted into artist markets, I needed to show them what items I had to sell…but obviously I didn’t want to invest in manufacturing prints if I didn’t know whether or not I’d even get a table in the first place! But once I was able to get over that fear, it paid off immensely—I had such an amazing time at LA Zine Fest, and it has taken its spot as one of my favorite memories.

Honored to have been a witness— your work really did pay off; that crowd was pretty impressive and your display deserved the attention. But now that LAZF is behind us, are there any new pieces you’re excited to bring to the next fest?

I’m really proud of how the riso print of this drawing of my characters turned out—I had it done by the folks at Secret Room Press up in Portland, Oregon and they did an amazing job! The different colors you can get out of three riso inks still amazes me.

Tell us more about your characters. Hopefully they’re more Aloha than miserable! Are they autobiographical?

I love making characters because to me it feels so special to keep in touch with a very childlike and creative part of your imagination—characters can be whatever you want them to be!

The characters in this riso print are my characters Angel (top) and Rose (bottom), two best friends who are trying to navigate relationships at the end of college while making music in a band with their friends. They’re just trying to be creative young adults, just like me.

I made them when I was just starting college during the pandemic, so I got to project a lot of my anxieties (especially about entering adulthood) onto them. I feel like the characters I mostly draw now come from different parts of my personality: the confident side, the insecure side, the kind side, the mean side, etc.—they all come out in each of my characters, I think. But since I’m still not a seasoned writer, I end up just drawing them in outfits that I think are cool, and that’s what this print is…honestly, characters can just be dress-up dolls too and that’s okay. Seeing how you can design outfits that match their personalities is fun already!

Hailey, I am so appreciative of your time and participation in this project and I can’t wait to see what’s next for ALOHAMISERY.

In the meantime, and as a final sendoff, I’d love for you to get your plug on… how can our dear readers buy up the remaining inventory of your Sho Time prints, “The Pickle” zines, or any of your other amazing creations?

I’m planning on doing more artist alley/artist market tabling events—it’s one of my resolutions this year! So you could probably catch me at one of those around LA. Also, You can visit my portfolio site at alohamisery.com, and if I have any updates about an online shop, Instagram will hear it first: @alohamisery is where they’ll be! It’s also the only social media platform I’m on…