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.
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.
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.
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