Category Archives: art

Attempted Guitars

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Usually, things come together for me. Occasionally they don’t. Sometimes I give up.

i spent 2 days trying to make nephling number 3 a 3-dimensional card with an electric guitar with real strings but I couldn’t find a satisfactory way to attach the strings and after the 7th time they fell out I gave up and drew a 2-dimensional electric guitar, which I am also not happy with. But camp is only 2 weeks long and if I didn’t actually mail them something they wouldn’t actually receive it.

So this is something I made that never aligned with my vision and I had to just accept it as it was and call it finished. And that was the whole “giving up on perfection” part of my artistic process that allowed me to create all the stuff in this blog. Sometimes you have to call it “done” or “good enough” even if you don’t feel like it is.

I started a big (like 2′ x 4′) painting but it will probably be some time before that’s finished. I’m working on a nonfiction book, a sort of biography about the Coyote’s life. It’s a very interesting life. I mostly know the whole story by heart because GOLLY does that guy like to talk and if he can’t think of something new to say he just returns to his greatest hits. Fortunately, it’s a very interesting life. Most of the book is about the parts I was in, but he was 55 already when I met him.

There’s this other thing I want to share here, about my relationship to art, but perhaps that’s another post.

The New Dawn

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Finally had a couple days to finish this painting I started last summer. I wanted to paint something for my aunt, who was mourning my grandmother very deeply. This kind of complements the kind of art she already has in her home. I was already tinkering with some similar imagery and theme in another painting I’m planning, so this ended up being a bit of a study for the bigger work (which is mostly sketched).

Maybe I’ll actually paint the other one, too. It’s meant as the companion piece for this other painting from 2023. It’s supposed to be “what it would look like if you loved yourself.” I assume it would look like me completing and selling my creative works on a regular basis.

Anyway, THIS painting is imperfect but I hope it has the intended effect. It’s supposed to be joyful, expressing how every morning is a new beginning, and that we are allowed to feel good about ourselves regardless of what happened yesterday.

If I painted more I’m sure I would be better at it. Also this probably would have come out better if I painted it on canvas instead of a scrap wood. Her left eye is a little wonky because it corresponded with a weird bump in the wood that I didn’t sand down correctly. I didn’t have the right brush for some of the details and I tried to use other random items and my fingers and I just gave up on her fingers. But I think it’s nice. I always learn a lot with every project.

Stay Cool

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I kind of phoned this one in because I had very limited time and was kind of distracted and there were 3 bulletin boards to cover before the end of the year. But the breezeway looks nice for the Cub Club kids and summer staff and any prospective families who come tour the school.

Closer views:

And then there was this smaller bulletin board on the other side of the library door:

13 Ways of Looking at The Waters 13: The Spider from the Darkness

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Whew! That’s a wrap on the black and white pages. I still have the colored pages (front and back cover, inside and outside) to finish, but they’re well underway. Hopefully by the time you see this, they’ll be done as well.

“The Spider from the Darkness” is the story I wrote to replace the second Lorena story, meaning I wrote it well after I wrote the others. However, it was the first page I finished when I started illustrating the comic. I love the water lily and the heart and the spider and the semi-feral girl and the butterflies and even that silly asymmetrical sun, which shouldn’t work, but somehow does.

If all goes well, I hope this comic will be available in print at some point in the near future, and, if possible, I hope I’ll be able to bring it to some nice conference–ALA’s 2026 gathering in Chicago would be my preference–where I can discuss it with other Bonnie Jo Campbell scholars and perhaps entice new readers to The Waters.

13 Ways of Looking at The Waters 12: The Girl Who Came to Land

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If you are among the chosen few who read my unpublished novel The Girl Who Followed Her Own Counsel you might see some parallels between this story and one of the Little Red Riding Hood variants in that novel. The point is: either you grow up or you die. There’s no option where you stay a kid forever no matter what your family does to keep you there. If you keep living, you’re always going to become an adult, and, sad as it is, your grandparents are always going to decline as you rise.

I had what one might call a prolonged childhood, by choice, in which I was able to keep a youthful outlook on everything until I was about 35. Adulthood never really suited me, though, and I’m happy to move on to my crone phase. I’m happy to be a witch. I was never cut out to be a grown up.

Perhaps not coincidentally, my grandmother lived to 96 and only passed away about a year ago, when I was 49. Now I’m grandmother-aged myself. You can’t stop the progression of time. You can’t stop your children from growing up.

13 Ways of Looking at The Waters 11: The Spirit of the Waters

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The Spirit of the Waters is probably my favorite thing I drew for this comic, which is why she’s going to be a full color feature of the Table of Contents and probably, at some point in the future after this comic is put to bed and after my literary journal release party and hopefully after getting out of jury duty, I hope to make it a sticker. There’s a few images in this comic that would make good stickers.

13 Ways of Looking at The Waters 9: Earth’s Child, page 2

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It was such a big, white space! This one gave me a lot of trouble too, mostly because I needed to fill it up. I drew a bunch of different flowers that I hated and never finished before I got inspired to do these giant stylized dandelion puffs, which are excellent and magical.

13 Ways of Looking at The Waters 9: Earth’s Child, page 1

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Sweet Lorena is probably the most blameless character in the book, even though she certainly has to suffer through the nonsense everyone else creates. The story puts some distance between her and the reader, while marveling at what a standup person she is.

As mentioned previously, I wrote most of these stories in a kind of fugue state, which led to me writing Lorena’s story twice because I forgot I had already written it. I ended up discarding the second one, in which she is characterized as “the strong girl” but has to go through basically this same nonsense. (Rose is a siren in that one.)

After I drew this image, I felt like it wasn’t quite done and then I realized it needed a squirrel laughing at the prince in the tree, so I added that.

13 Ways of Looking at the Waters 8: Princess and Lindworm or the Three Sisters, page 3

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I’m very pleased with Princess’s bloody arm in the last panel. I’m afraid that I just couldn’t get a background that I was happy with for either image and gave up. Imagine that these picture are drawn in the royal seer’s dark workshop.