Anything is a bead if you just believe

Leave a reply

I didn’t used to think of this sort of thing as art—it’s not like I made the beads; I just tied them to a piece of stretchy filament—but I suppose that’s like saying a painting isn’t art because I didn’t make the paint.

Probably I’ve mentioned this before, but I spent DECADES of my life hoarding art supplies. My family didn’t really value art (they said they did, but they didn’t; they valued capitalism and they didn’t think art was part of capitalism so therefore it was not as important as anything that resulted in a regular paycheck) and when I did receive art supplies it was impressed upon me that they were both expensive and frivolous and I must not waste them because nobody was going to replace things that I used up. And when I moved to my new place at the beginning of the pandemic I vowed to stop hoarding (what was I saving this stuff for anyway) and (after throwing out bags of unused but dried-out paying and markers) I began enjoying my massive collection of every kind of art supply.

Soooo…

Last Christmas I mentioned to the Coyote that I wanted the kind of tiny cut glass prism suncatcher that made rainbows everywhere. And he, being him, gave me 20 of them. So I had the idea to make an unconventional kind of beaded curtain with them, so my whole house would be filled with rainbows every day.

To that end I dug through the 2 drawers labeled “beads and shells” in my studio, and then went through the rest of the house, and came up with every little thing that could possibly be construed as a bead, and a few things that definitely weren’t beads in any sense but whatever, I’m going to tie them to these beads anyway. Then I sorted them by theme and tried to “tell a story” with each strand.

Some of these elements are quite old; many of them are things I’ve been carrying since the ’80s and a few of them are likely much older. For example, one of the “beads” is a broken ring that might be jade or malachite or turquoise and probably belonged to one of my ancestors. And then some of the elements are very new: the metal horse was randomly given to me by an artist at a street fair last year. I didn’t buy any beads for this project. Everything here was already in the house (except for the tension bar I used to hang them, and also I had to buy another roll of stretchy filament when I ran out halfway through). There’s old earrings and discards from the Bear’s shop and broken wind chimes and little art pieces I made in the ’90s and have kept in a box since then…

Here you can zoom in and see all the details.

If I had just used beads I expect this would have been easier and more relaxing but tying a bunch of random objects did make it a bit more complicated. Worth it, though, I think. It’s not really apparent from the photo, but I also used 12 colors of embroidery floss to tie them up so there’s another rainbow even when the sun isn’t shining through them.

For me, it’s harder to make art in a trashed space. I’m not comfortable doing it in a perfectly clean one either, but my brain doesn’t function as well if things are very messy, and frankly, my house had not been clean since before I had covid, which was a year ago. I paid Miss Kitty to do 5 hours of deep cleaning this week, and I did about 10–15 further hours, and then I was just standing there in my perfectly clean house looking at my perfectly empty table thinking, “O, wow, I can totally finish a project in this space!”

And I did. And it’s great. I picked up another project that I’d abandoned months ago and worked on that as well.

I actually had a few moments where the freedom of not-a-mess was so incredible that I almost cried

So my house is clean, my mind is clear, and every day is going to bring rainbows.

He was shortish and oldish and brownish and mossy

Leave a reply

And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.

Just a small commission to recreate the Lorax, a cryptid who was truly ahead of his time, so far ahead of his time that it was 35 years between the publication of the original source material and the film version (retitled An Inconvenient Truth) starring former future United States President Al Gore as the Lorax. And that film was also ahead of its time, and no one wanted hear the Lorax’s message then either, and now the world is on fire. And I don’t even have a truffula seed.

Tra-la-la. We knew what we were doing 100 years ago and we could see the effects 20 years ago when we still had a chance to fix it and now it’s too late. Tra-la-la.

Behold! The 13-Lined Ground Squirrel!

Leave a reply

Here’s a delightful little commission I did for the writer Heidi Bell, for the cover of her collection, Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse and Other Stories, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, October 2024.

The way it was explained to me, one of the stories features a critter that Bell refers to as a gopher, and thus the designer chose a gopher as one of the images for the cover. But as it turns out, it’s not a gopher. Bell sent me a picture of the animal to which she was referring and I ran it through Google image search, and learned about 13-lined ground squirrels, which, in some parts of the US, are colloquially/regionally/demotically called gophers.

Perhaps coincidentally, the gopher picture chosen by the designer was drawn in a style very similar to work I’ve done in the past. After looking at the original gopher drawing and 50 photos of 13-lined ground squirrels, the work began.

On my first attempt I made his tail WAY TOO FLUFFY, so I had to erase it and start again, but otherwise it went smoothly. I am still getting used to my new computer, which has some odd glitches that I am working around for now because I have no idea how to address them (if I set the stylus down in the upper left quadrant of the screen, it makes random dots in other parts of the screen, but I can’t draw, although if a line starts in another part of the screen and continues into the upper left quadrant it works fine). I was so used to the old Wacom that drawing directly on the screen still feels weird, but I’m getting acclimated.

Also, the stylus that came with this computer apparently runs on batteries? Which died an hour after I started using it? And rather than live at the mercy of technology that could betray me at any vulnerable moment in that manner, I decided to work with a capacitive stylus. And rather than actually go out and buy a capacitive stylus, I have just been using some random pen with a little rubber nub at the end that doubles as a capacitive stylus. I got it for free at some festival over a decade ago. It has an advertisement for a private k–12 school on the side. It’s an extremely inelegant solution, but it works. It works much better than when I had to draw 3 mosquitoes with my finger on a touchpad last year.

I think it’s the exact sort of complication that helps you bloom in adversity.

Feeling Good

Leave a reply

Originally, I planned to create this bulletin board in January, as a tribute to the new year. I also planned for it to not be cold and cloudy all year. I also planned to make the letters very fancy and musical. As they say, life is what happens when you’re making other plans. We haven’t got much sun, but I did my best to summon it.

I didn’t put an attribution on this quote. I knew that neither Muse nor Michael Buble was the original author. For a while I thought it was Nina Simone, but it turns out that some people I never heard of wrote it in 1964, the year before Ms. Simone made her recording, and frankly their names (Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse) were long and I wanted to go home.

The whole thing is kind of slapdash but I’ve learned that if I try to make things perfect, I fail, but it I start out making things wabi-sabi, the finished product LOOKS perfect.

The View from Whiteheart Michigan

Leave a reply

This is another commission that I drew quite some time ago but didn’t have permission to share until now, and it is the map of the fictional town of Whiteheart and environs as described in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s forthcoming (WW Norton, January 2014) novel, The Waters, which is an excellent novel that you should pre-order from you local independent bookstore or library.

You can read some more of my thoughts about this novel here and you can read some of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s thoughts about the map here.

As for the map, it took me a goodly time to figure it out. Originally she asked if I could do it in the style of the famous “View From 9th Avenue” New Yorker cover, and I did start out with a more conscious imitation, but as the project progressed, it sort of expanded in all kinds of direction that took it further and further away from that aesthetic (including changing from a portrait to a landscape orientation). Plus, to fit the aesthetic of the novel, I needed to fit a lot of plants and animals. And the roads and the sizes of things and their relationship to other things grew murky. I just had to make choices and roll with them and I’m all in all pretty pleased with the result, but also I wish it could have been twice as big and a little more technically accurate. There are so many more things I could have drawn.

Fun anecdote: in early drafts, a raven appeared in the top right of the map, but the raven didn’t make the final edit of the story, and the very last change I was asked to make was to replace him with some mosquitoes. Hilariously, following a series of events that began with me getting COVID, my MacBook could no longer pair with my Wacom tablet, and I was under deadline…so I drew those mosquitoes with one finger, using the touchpad. Do not recommend. I ended up replacing the MacBook with a Lenovo Yoga 9i, which is a far superior machine. The keyboard of that MacBook was a crime against Apple customers. It was literally an impediment to writing.

Anyway, this map, in a slightly altered configuration, will theoretically serve as the frontispiece of the novel (I say theoretically, because it did not appear in the ARC, and I believe things when I see them) which should be a great feather in my cap. Typically, major publishers only work with in-house artists, but Bonnie Jo went to bat for this map, and as far as I know, it will be there.

A Little Spark Bulletin Board

Leave a reply

Well I messed up the line spacing but otherwise this is fun and different.

Letters are hand cut based on the Holiday font. I think I might have actually used this one before. Simple shapes, easy to work with. The big spark is also hand cut, and the rest are drawn with metallic markers.

Always trying to find some light in the darkness.

Another Giant Sugar Skull

Leave a reply

I sort of want to keep working on this but it’s Friday and I like to leave school by 5….

This isn’t my first calavera bulletin board but this one is way better than the first one and after 12 years I guess it’s OK to repeat myself a little. But I really wish I could cover the whole thing with roses. And more dots and hearts on the skull. But sometimes you have to just say when.

It Is a Tree of Life

Leave a reply

I made this cute tree with 3-dimensional books for in interior bulletin board, so it should last a while. I’ve done a similar design in the past, but this time I cut the leaves out individually with the decorative scissors. The Girl (now 18, so a woman) was in town that week (she left town early in the pandemic) and she came and helped me make the books, which are just folded paper scraps and staples.

Light Box Prototype

Leave a reply

This is something I’ve been thinking about since I finished the feigned glass windows: feigned glass light box. Michael’s had some tiny shadow boxes that they were, of course, sold out of, but I got this bigger box and The Man cut a hole in the back and installed the LEDs.

I used clear plastic for a background and sealed the whole thing with the clear plastic as well, and the rest of the design is scrap pieces from the original project, except for the bats, which are heavy cardstock that I painted purple. I used hot glue to stick affix the panel to the box and then more hot glue to seal the edges with ribbon.

This particular box was created to be a birthday present.

Definitely want to do some more experimentation with this type of thing but I have to find a good (affordable) source for the boxes and the lights.