This is obviously just the attribution to the quote, and I was kind of out of steam. But the cactus came out cool. I made the saguaros wavy because that’s actually how they look when it rains. They store up so much water they get little rolls like fat. When they don’t get any rain, they shrivel up and get skinny and look sad. I like them fat and jolly like this.
The prickly pear has one pad shaped like heart, because when you go among prickly pears, there’s always one pad shaped like a heart.
Usually I guess I go a little brighter for the summer bulletin board, but overall I’m satisfied. I know it’s not summertime for most of the country yet, but it’s definitely summertime here in the desert.
This is the second part of the Joseph Wood Krutch quote from A Desert Year. This image is also kind of minimalistic compared to my other work, and the photo also doesn’t quite do it justice.
If you zoom in you can see that the raindrops have a sort of Eric Carle thing going on. I wanted then to look sort of luminous and I thought I could use use the metallic markers on the black paper but that wasn’t bright enough. So I colored a variety of blues with a bit of green and purple to cover a bit of white paper and cut the raindrops from that, and the effect is pretty good. I added some staples to make it look wetter.
The Desert Year is a lovely piece of naturalist writing originally published in 1952, by a professor named Joseph Wood Krutch. He wasn’t a desert dweller—he was an east coast guy—but he came out to Tucson once and found himself enchanted. So when his next sabbatical came around, he took a year to immerse himself in the Sonoran Desert, joyfully observing the land, the climate, the flora, and the fauna, and recording his observations into this classic work of nonfiction.
These bulletin boards are a bit bare compared to some of my work. I’m not sure this picture does the “clouds” justice. I was trying to make them look textured , with a silver lining. It’s more clear in real life. I could have done more. But I’m presenting my comic to the American Literature Association conference this week and I needed to be reasonable with my time. I was trying to finish this Friday but I lost an hour dealing with my insurance company and that was that. I had to come in today. But this was my last day of the 2026 school year.
Letters are all cut freehand in a font I just created based on curved lines. I don’t know why H and A came out so much smaller than everyone else but it kind of works.
This is the first part of a quote he wrote about his first glimpse of the monsoon. The second part is on the the middle bulletin board. The monsoon is still a ways off this year, but they are calling for an El Niño year, which can only be good for us if it actually happens
Well, I did it again: I got 18 elementary kids so jazzed about writing that they filled a literary magazine. This is the biggest issue yet, with about 70 pages of stories, poems, plays, comics, and illustrations. The table of contents alone is 3 pages long.
We throw a little literary reading party where they each get up and share their work out loud, and I think this year’s was also bigger than we’ve ever done as well. We definitely had more people than chairs.
In the past, when I’ve shared this project with others, the most common response I’ve gotten is, “I didn’t know children could do this,” which is weird to me, because this is exactly what I was doing when I was their age, except I was doing it by myself without any social, emotional, or financial support. So I’ve always known children could do this. A blank piece of paper is more expansive than the whole of the internet. This magazine is what happens when we give kids that space.
But I think the reason it seems surprising now is that we do not always give young people space to stretch these muscles, and it’s not a secret that I think the internet is huge part of the issue, because we now have 2 decades of evidence that the proliferation of screens is negatively impacting all of us on a cognitive level. Every time we resort to the screen in place of other forms of engagement, we’re denying kids the opportunity to flex their minds and achieve the kind of intellectual expansion that allows us to produce this magazine. Which is also ironic, because many of my students would be greatly served by learning to touch type, and a lot of them definitely deserve new laptops to help them write more, and faster.
So I create a super permissive environment where the kids have license write anything (literally anything; they know that if they need to write things that are considered “inappropriate” in other aspects of their lives, they’re allowed. I don’t criticize. I don’t put it in the magazine, and if it’s upsetting to the other kids I don’t let them read it out loud, but they are allowed to write swears and violence and so on, and only occasionally do I ask the psychologist or guidance counselor if I should be worried, because this job ALSO makes me a mandated reporter) and they do.
This issue has some pretty grim moments. It’s definitely darker than the previous issues, probably because kids are canaries in the coal mine and they are sucking up all the poisonous miasma of their environment. It’s hard to see. But maybe this work helps them process. Maybe it’s a kind of antidote.
Like both previous issues, this magazine has a queer love story, anthropomorphic food, surprisingly sensitive poetry, multiple unfinished novels, and bizarre horror stories. It also has our first choose-your-own-adventure story, which is also horror, and has 5 possible endings: 1 good one where you wake up in your bed and your mom is making breakfast, 3 bad ones where you die, and 1 very bad one, where you have to spend eternity doing i-Ready, which is a standardized testing app despised by children across the country.
it’s too bad there aren’t more resources for clubs like this.
So obviously I had to go beyond my normal sources to get this many different greens. Fortunately, I knew where to go and had many different options available. In the end I think it was something like 15 different kinds of paper: butcher paper, printer paper, construction paper, origami paper, tissue paper, and specialty paper.
The attribution to JRR Tolkien was actually yellow paper but I did the lettering in 2 green marker outlined with green pen and then colored the rest of the paper with a different green marker.
Even though I was just going for strips of green, a lot of people saw a forest in this design. One person even specifically suggested a birch forest.
All 3 of these bulletin boards took about 14 hours.
I’m just posting these all at once so they don’t slip my mind again, because I actually finished them Friday and now it’s Monday. So this is part two of the verse.
This panel was in fact the second one I did, and it was fun cutting a million trees and tearing up paper for the river, at first. After a while it got onerous and I had to throw away so many pieces I messed up. I couldn’t help but think of the giant mallorn trees, but this forest was supposed to be about GREEN and in any case what I saw in my mind’s eye was pine.
I recently reread Lord of the Rings, which I think is more relevant now than it’s ever been, being a tale of unlikely heroes compelled by honor and duty to do the right thing in the face of certain death. Like every single character knows their enterprise is doomed to fail but they march grimly toward their own putative demise because that’s what you do when evil threatens to overwhelm your world.
But they have some nice moments mixed in with the doom, like Lothlórien, where the grass is festooned with the golden, star shaped elanor flowers and the white, snowdrop niphredil.
Even though this panel is the first of three, I did the image last.. The flowers and letters are cut paper but the stems and leaves are markers. The font is based on Aniron.
The quote is from a poem of Bilbo Baggins sings to Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring, an old hobbit wistful with nostalgia, watching a young hobbit prepare to make a journey beyond any he can imagine.
It didn’t quite match the vision in my head but on the whole I’m pretty pleased with this card. The lettering is basically balanced and the cat is pretty cute. I got some very wonderful new art pens and all the fine lines are from that set, and then the thick ones are Sharpies.
Our school mascot is a lion and this card is for the outgoing librarian, who sadly had to leave yesterday. But hopefully she carries the spirit of the lion with her wherever she goes.
People keep asking me what it is and I’m like, “It’s very obviously a fish with a mustache wearing a top hat.” A fancy koi fish, to be precise. Like how is that not obvious? I feel like, while I may not be the greatest artist in the world, when I make a picture of a fish with a mustache wearing a top hat, it looks exactly like a fish with a mustache wearing a top hat.
It goes with the jackalope and the catterflies. I actually finished it last week but I was so tired I forgot to take a picture of it. He took so much extra time to make because I accidentally put his face on sideways and it was a lot of work to fix it and cover up the mistake.
The sakura blossoms, of course, symbolize the fleeting nature of life, youth, and beauty.
Originally I was going to make 7 of these “part real, part imaginary” banners because there are 7 columns but already there is a giant sun? sunflower? occupying one of them and I think it’s possible I might be asked to create a large Dewey Decimal System poster for another, plus it’s time to change out the bulletin boards and then comes the mad rush to lay out the literary journal and get that to the printer’s so it’s ready for the release party, immediately after which I’m going to Chicago to present my new comic book at the American Literary Association convention.
So, we’ll see. But this fish with a mustache and a top hat is a vision realized. Originally I thought he might also wear a monocle but that would just be silly, right?
As promised, the second set of fun chimineas and fiesta flags.
And here’s a bonus:
Not much to say about this. I had fun with it but there was so much going on in my life it took me like 3 weeks to finish. Tomorrow is the last day before break.
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