At long last, we have come to the final meerkat. Construction meerkat has a lot of heavy lifting to do, but I am setting my stylus down for a minute.
Have no fear! I will not abandon this blog for months on end. Not any time soon, anyway. Later today or early tomorrow I will share the project I did this week (marker on foam core) and by the end of next week I hope to share pages from my new comic book, Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics Volume 5.
Can you believe how many meerkats I crammed into this sticker? Originally it was a more diverse group of creatures, to wit, a kangaroo, a llama, a panda, an elk, a sloth, and an ostrich, all wearing cool Black Rock Desert garb, but the client requested…moar meerkats in lab coats.
The name of this vehicle is the Databeast and it’s a real truck, somewhere.
Surprise, surprise! It’s another meerkat!
These other animals were fun to design too.
Here you can observe another meerkat in its natural habitat, which is great for you, I’m sure.
Well, here is a meerkat doing data entry at Burning Man. That’s what it is.
Happy International Trans Day of Visibility! As always, I’m nonbinary. So, I have reason to believe, is this meerkat.
My poor, neglected blog!
I’ve been diverting 100% of my creative energy into the new comic book since October but it is still tantalizing in the Zeno’s paradox of incompletion. Very close. SURELY by next month. Unless I break both my hands or fall into a coma or die, it HAS to be done by next month. I just have to finish one interior page and the front cover, inside and outside and also start and finish the back cover, inside and out.
So close.
I took a little break over the last week or so for this small commission of a series of 6 stickers featuring a meerkat in a lab coat at Burning Man.
So that’s what this is: 1 of 6. I’ll try to post them every day until you have experienced the complete adventures of Census Meerkat. And pretty soon after that you can watch this space for Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics Volume 5.
Somehow I managed to carve out a couple hours to finish this thing before December swallows the clock whole! I start teaching again tomorrow, so that’s going to eat up my Tuesdays until May. I needed to get this thing done.
i feel like I slightly phoned it in. Mismeasured the last line so that’s annoying but what can you do? I mismeasured where I placed the tyger on the first board and had to truncate his tail. O well.
This is basically a joke for myself and the very few other people who are familiar with this poem AND my work. Because the poem is religiously themed. The whole book is about God, a mystic experience of God, but a Christian God, which I don’t believe in. Obviously, I don’t think my hand or eye are immortal, but the evidence is right here—it’s *my* hand and eye that framed this paper tyger’s fearful symmetry.
So that’s what I created. A meta-tyger to illustrate my mortal and two-dimensional fabrication of a tyger.
I doubt anyone at the school will get it or notice.
I had to go back after I finished and change the scissors. The scissors I was using at the time had black handles, so I made the paper scissors black as well, rendering them invisible against the black background. I hastily patched red handles on top when I realized my mortal mistake, so the second pair isn’t quite as perfectly aligned with the hands and blades as the first, but I think this scans.
This is, of course, an excerpt from William Blake’s “The Tyger” from his book Songs of Experience. This is a famous poem you likely read in English class a million years ago, which explores religious themes about creation. In the book, the poem appears in Blake’s handwriting, accompanied by a watercolor illustration of a tiger, which suggests that William Blake never saw a tiger in his life and had no idea what one might look like (Blake’s tiger looks like a taxidermied sloth-bear-dog) but he didn’t have the benefit of being able to access the sum total of human knowledge from a tiny box from which he could lifelike images of his subject while lounging around the studio in his pajamas.
Not being the religious type, I have a fun idea for the next panel, which I hope to finish next week.
My tiger is also hilariously inaccurate, but in my lifetime I have seen many tigers, real and in images and videos, and I think mine, as comical and cartoonish as I made it, is more recognizably tigerish.
As usual I see a million mistakes I made. But it’s cute. I just don’t have the time or energy to focus minutely on this project lately. I am making a lot of art, and my hand only has so many hours of functionality.
And here is the sister bulletin board. It’s slightly bigger than the original and I definitely wish I had had more time to fill it up.
I also wish I’d had time to make the stems curlier.
Anyway, let it not be said that I didn’t do my part in preparing the school and the students for autumn.
OK, so as mentioned in my last post, I now have control of the second bulletin board again, and finally I had the chance to coordinate the 2, in this case with a harvest theme: gourds and mushrooms. I don’t know. That’s what came out.
I’m making 2 separate posts even though they’re linked.
I’m pretty happy with the gourds and mushrooms, but I would have been happier if I had more time. I lost a couple days because the AC has been out since May and it’s kind of unbearable in there most of the time, and then I was called away to Kansas for family stuff. So I really jammed to get these up in 2 days.
If I had had more time I would have made more gourds and mushrooms. Some of them I spent a lot of time making and some I dashed out, but they all look OK, I think.
Of course, Arizona is experiencing record-breaking heat, and even Kansas is pretty warm and not at all autumnal.
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