Understory has been live for eleven days. Packs are opening, the eight commons are turning up on people's counters, and somebody out there is holding a Headspace. Here's the longer read, for anyone who wants to know what they're actually pulling.
The Word
An understory is the layer of a forest that lives underneath the canopy. Shrubs, saplings, ferns, the things that grow in broken light because the big trees took the sun. You don't see it from the road. You see it once you're in the woods.
Damon Sheeley's catalog, some with small figures standing in enormous landscapes, so the title is doing more than sounding nice. A blind collection is literally a set with a layer you can't see from outside. Ten designs, eight of them in plain view, two of them growing in the dark until somebody opens the right pack.
He'd Been Drawing It Already
If you've been carrying Paperwallet for a while, Understory is going to feel familiar, and that's because it is.
Halcyon, his first Micro with us, was line-drawn mountains on lined notebook paper with a gold sun hanging over them. It looked like a page torn out of somebody's trail journal. Tether followed on the Slim. Find Yourself came on the Micro in spring. Solivagant put him on the Passport Wallet, and if you look that word up it means a person who wanders alone, which tells you most of what you need to know about the figures in his pictures.
Line the four of them up next to the eight revealed Understory commons and the vocabulary is identical. Engraved mountain ranges. Flat gold suns and moons. Starfields. A lone figure, always small, always looking at something bigger than it is. Understory didn't come from nowhere. It's the same sketchbook, given ten frames instead of one.
Who He Is
Portland illustrator. Runs the art brand SheeleyCo, which sells prints, stickers, patches, enamel pins, stationery and keychains, and takes select freelance on book covers, branding and album art. He left a 9-to-5 career in his 40s to do this full time.
He describes his own work as being built on nostalgia, nature, quiet reflection, existential weirdness and dry humor, pulled from mid-century design and old ephemera. The dry humor is the part people miss. Look at the titles.
The Titles Read Like a Record Crate
Night Moves. Daybreak. Soft Shadows. Static Forest. Traveller. Starchild. Natural Path. Within Ourselves. And the two hidden ones, Headspace and Space Is The Place.
We're not going to tell you which of those are nods to which records, partly because we didn't ask him and partly because it's more fun to argue about. But anybody who's flipped through a crate of used vinyl has seen most of those words on a spine, and that is not a coincidence you can prove or disprove, which is the best kind.
The Honest Math
The pull rates are printed on the collection page and we'd rather you understood them than guessed.
Each of the eight commons pulls at 1:9. The rare, Headspace, pulls at 1:18. The super rare, Space Is The Place, pulls at 1:36.
What that means in practice: open a handful of packs and you'll almost certainly be looking at commons, probably a couple of repeats among them. The rare shows up for roughly one person in eighteen. The super rare is a one-in-thirty-six event, which is rare enough that most people chasing the set will finish the eight commons long before they see it.
That's not a trick. It's the whole structure of a chase piece. If Space Is The Place turned up every fourth pack it wouldn't mean anything when it did.
What Nobody Has a Picture Of
Headspace and Space Is The Place are still question marks on our end. We never published the artwork and we're not going to. The only photographs of those two designs that exist are the ones taken by people who pulled them, and we'd genuinely like to see yours.
Every one of the ten is a Micro Wallet: 1.3mm thin, 6 to 8 cards plus folded cash, RFID-blocking like everything we make apart from the coin pouch, Tyvek so it's waterproof at the fiber level and the print doesn't shift when it gets wet.
Limited run, no restock, no reprint. The packs are in the Blind Collection Series 2 collection while they last, and the rest of the shelf is in the full collection.
