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.
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.
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.
The librarian asked me to decorate the book drop in such a way as to make it appear more prominent and obvious. A lot of kids don’t seem to understand that you can’t just leave your library book in some random place on the circulation desk. I mean, you can, but you can’t expect it to get checked in. It will just sit there, unnoticed, and then, when you try to check out a new book, the person at the circulation desk will explain to you for the 57th time how libraries work. And you’ll insist that you DID return your book. And the adult will explain it to you for the 58th time. And then you’ll find the book in the random place where you left it and get angry because SEE you did return it. And then we have to explain how libraries work for 59th time.
You’re probably an adult and don’t need me to explain how libraries work. And the kids shouldn’t need the explanation either BECAUSE THEY’VE ALREADY HEARD IT. But kids need a lot of repetition.
If you put your book in the book drop it will get checked in. If you don’t put your book in the book drop it won’t get checked in.
If you put your book into the book drop and then try to check a new book out 30 seconds later, your book will also not be checked in because clearly if I’m talking to you at the desk I can’t be looking in the book drop at the same time. They’re like 20 feet apart. If your issue is immediate you can give your book directly to the person at the desk. But, generally speaking—book goes in book drop; staff retrieves books at regular intervals when they have time to look; staff checks books in.
it’s not rocket science. But it’s not getting though.
Hence this hungry, hungry hippo. I don’t know how long he’ll last, but I had him laminated and mounted him on cardboard so hopefully he’s tough.
When I finished making him but before I had him laminated, I sent a picture to the Fox, who said he was liable to give kids nightmares. So I went back and made his eyes less creepy and the kids who have seen him so far thought he was great.
Nobody has fed him any books yet but I’m sure he’ll get something tomorrow.
It’s that time once again!
You might be thinking it’s too soon! It can’t possibly be that time. But here in Tucson, school starts in August. To be completely accurate, it begins tomorrow, August 1.
I didn’t have any inspiration when I walked in the building, but I noticed that someone had chucked a perfectly good bit of fancy paper in the recycling bin. I am forever pulling things out of recycling, sometimes because they are not recyclable, and sometimes because they are reusable by me.
So I got started with the background and the lettering and this pretty foiled paper was just winking at me. Water…ducks…rain…pun. Voila! Plus we’re still inside the monsoon.
Took about 5½ hours total but I stopped for a lot of conversation. Also the air conditioning has been broken since last May and it was 84° in there, which slows you down. I had a lot of conversations about that.
I’m very satisfied with this project, which took about 90 minutes. (It’s not quite done; the feathers aren’t attached to the hat yet.)
The Coyote and I are going to a goth masquerade ball and I have a very cool outfit put together but it seemed like I should add a top hat to match him and to enby it up. So he ordered me one, but it turned out to be a large, when my head is extra small. And it took forever to come and when it got here I was not impressed with the little feather that came with it.
Obviously it needed a big silver feather! Obviously there were some good ones on Etsy but none that could be delivered before the ball, which was annoying until it hit me that I could easily make paper feathers with materials already in my workshop. Just 3 kinds of sparkly metallic specialty paper and matte medium.
To be extra fancy I sharpened the scissors on a whetstone before beginning.
So here it is. And I will be the most magical dragon at the ball. Although I still have to figure out how to attach my mask to my glasses. Because I went to this masquerade last year in a different mask and I couldn’t see a thing all night. The new one is lace and can probably be tied on.
The person who commission me to create this wild interior van wrap asked me to create some window clings, “so my van looks like not my parents’ van.” And thus the rainbow slothicorn rides again. I had a lot of fun with it. Obviously. It took me way longer than I like to admit; I could have fidgeted with the details for another month but given that it’s intended to appreciated while zipping past at 75 mph I guess it gets the job done.
I also designed some banners so they could cover up the vehicle’s logo with a fun rainbow sign sharing the vehicle’s name.
The vehicle is named “The Prideful Sloth.”
For this job, I gave up on using the Lenovo touchscreen to draw directly and went back to the Wacom tablet. It just works better for my purposes. It’s more comfortable to use. I drew a bunch of things without it in the last year and the convenience of not having a second device never outweighed the functionality of the Wacom for my purposes.
i overscheduled myself and budgeted my time poorly and burnt out and forgot my inspiration…so I ended up knocking out this little axolotl and then never going back to give them an environment or an interesting quote. It’s just an axolotl. The kids love axolotls.
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