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.
.
This is probably the latest winter holiday bulletin board I ever did: Friday is the last day of school and I just got it up yesterday. I’m not thrilled with the fact that the flags are just suspended in space but I needed to be done. I spent a lot of hours on it but I never have enough time.
But this is a very Tucson kind of scene. I love that chiminea on the left and wish it were real and in my back yard.
I noticed the kinders all putting their hands up to the fires like they were trying to warm up. I must add that, even though it was cold when I had this idea, it was 82° when I finished and the kinders were pretending to warm their hands by the fire. That’s Tucson for you.
I’ll post more chimineas tomorrow. The third bulletin board just says “STAY WARM” in big letters. I probably won’t post it at all because it’s not that interesting.
I went to a birthday party for the Coyote’s mom who turned 97! She was a famous beauty (literally) in the 20th century and she also was known for drawing little mousies, so I tried to draw this bombshell mouse in her style. Big hair, little red dress, and a champagne toast
I’m partially satisfied with my success. It was a busy week and I didn’t feel well and it was left to the last minute and I guess I fell asleep before i finished and had to color it in the car on the way to Phoenix. So possibly could have been better. But she loved it. I also gave her a snowflake, one of the best ones I’ve cut since my snowflake workshop.
I gave the rest of the snowflakes to the librarian.
They asked me if I would participate in Science Night and present an activity that combined science and art, so I’m doing snowflake cutting. I’ve wanted to teach a little class on this for a long time, actually. A lot of kids don’t seem to know about how much fun we had making things with our hands before the internet.
This poster presentation took a ridiculous amount of time, like 8 or 10 hours. It would have taken a quarter of that time and looked much sharper if I made it in Photoshop but it’s more fun making imperfect things with your hands.
I only made a couple real mistakes and I was able to mostly fix them.
This is a commission and it’s hand lettered so I guess I should put it here. There is some controversy at a local school district and those TPUSA d-bags will be there to scream about how their religion requires them to hurt marginalized people, so of course the Coyote, who is also a one of those radical priests who think Jesus wanted people to feed the hungry and welcome the immigrant and support the marginalized will be there too, wearing his collar and carrying this sign.
This banner was many weeks in the making, not because I spent a lot of time working on it, but because i spent so much time working on other things. There’s a lot to do in a library. So I stayed late twice this week and, I confess, cannibalized the flowers from another project completed some years back. Sometimes I save pieces of old bulletin boards. That saved a lot of time.
No idea what inspired the catterflies.
i took like 2 dozen photos of this little ornament I made for my mom and none of them came out very well, so I’m just posting this one with the caveat that it’s not a very good photograph. But I think it’s a pretty cute ornament.
Originally, I wanted to buy something like this, but I couldn’t find anything I liked well enough. Everything was either very ugly or very overpriced or both. And I’m not saying these are perfect, but I like them better than most of the things I saw in the stores, and I liked the price better as well.
The hummingbirds bodies are polymer clay, about an inch and a half long, and their beaks are wire. I found an old mother of pearl earring that looked kind of like a wing, and then threw in that purple bead for good measure. The designs are painted with acrylic paint. I found just enough of this red ribbon to hang this ornament, and then to tie a bow on the box that I put the ornament in.
I find that fascism is really crushing my creative spirit. It’s hard to take pleasure in making things anymore. It feels like work. There’s not a lot of joy left, but I also feel like if I don’t make things, then the fascists win.
My mom really liked her tiny birds.
One of the GATE teachers liked my owl bulletin board so much she gave me a book called October, October by Katya Balen, which prominently features an owl, although that owl is a baby barn owl and my original owl was an adult great horned owl (inspired by a juvenile great horned owl). I wanted to make her a little owl card but baby barn owls are kind of ugly so I drew an adult.
That’s this owl.
This one took 5 days! I mismeasured the letters in both directions so you really have to view the first 2 of these boards together because the text cut off in the middle and spills over.
Sometimes art is about forging forward regardless of existing mistakes.
Last week the Coyote and I were skinny dipping when suddenly the sky opened up in a much needed monsoon burst, so we heaved ourselves out of the pool and took cover under the porch, from which vantage porch we observed a juvenile great horned owl appearing to dance in the rain for 5 or 10 minutes.
The Coyote told me that this behavior is intended to keep their wings from being saturated so they can still fly even though they’re wet, but it did look like a lot of fun. Joyful.
I actually made the third panel first, and I absolutely delighted myself with every detail.
I was almost finished Friday and I potentially could have stopped but there was too much blank space, so I came back and added the stars and the blooms.
The feathers and the brooms all have 3-dimensional details that the kids may very well destroy but that’s what happens when you make ephemeral art for elementary students.
The Girl, who is now a young woman working on her mother’s hydroponic farm, asked me to draw this gag, which I did, 98%, and then just…forgot? It’s the brain fog.
I love this joke because it is accessible to an absolute tiny percentage of people. But it is very relevant if you like internet memes and you work on a hydroponic farm.
qwertyvsdvorak 