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.
I could have drawn a Dragon Comic about little kids wanting to pick up every single creature they come across but after the nonstop mayhem of my sister’s wedding, my brain is scrambled. I want to sleep, and even if I did draw a comic, I probably wouldn’t be able to upload it, because this hotel has the world’s worst wifi. (I’m using The Man’s hotspot but we have to turn it off soon because data costs money.) Anyway, my eyes are swimming. No drawing today.
Here instead is a photograph I took of some interesting plants growing out of what I assume is a pylon that once supported some kind of dock in Lake Whatcom, which is a funny name if you pronounce it as it’s written. The T, however, is silent: “WA-cum.” I guess it’s a funny name either way.
How long do you have to leave a chunk of wood sticking out of a lake before nature starts to reclaim it?
I had to wade out about 20 feet from the shore to get this shot; I was very cautious with the equipment. I really wish I had a waterproof camera, though, because then I would be showing you some stunning images of dragonflies on lily pads. Trust me, they were beautiful.
When I showed him the illustrations, before I added the text, he said, “I’m so glad you got outside.” Figuring out how to draw the Milky Way was the fun part of this drawing. Getting the silhouettes right was also something of a challenge, but not as much as it would have been 29 comics ago.
In case you’re wondering where Dragon’s tail is, it is flat and limp without the cave’s magic, and therefore spilling down the hill with no curl whatsoever.
In reality, I spend far too much time outside the cave. Why, just yesterday I went to 2 parties and 3 stores, and later found out that I missed an old friend passing through town due to my own busy-ness. And today I attended a Girl Scouts Brownies meeting for the first time since 1981. Fascinating. Getting the comic written is getting harder as the frantic part of the year encroaches, but I’m committed to at least 100 of them before I reevaluate.
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Boynton Canyon Vista is a short and sweet trail through the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness around Sedona. From the sandy red earth a forest of pine and oak, yucca and prickly pear twists its way up a gradually sloping path toward a peaceful saddle known as one of the region’s seven spiritual vortices.
Rows of rock balances
The forest might make be magic, or people might make it magical. Wordless cairns mark the way. A seemingly natural proliferation of heart-shaped rocks encourages the custom of setting these cordate stones into the forked and spiraling branches of juniper trees, sharing “a gift of love from mother earth” (not my words) with visitors . Around the saddle, hundreds of rock balances ring the last levels of the gentle rise like a prosperous miniature city strung out along a series of plateaus.
The Man was the champion of rock balancing. I said, “You’re an artist.” He said, “No, I’m an engineer.”
Jutting toward the sky on the south side of the side, a tower of red rock presides over the landscape. Heart-filled junipers shade the open land. The stones glow copper-gold against the surrounding forest.
My little balance, which I built 3 times, because I knocked it over twice while doing something else.
We climbed the spire of rock, although 3 out of 4 of us didn’t believe, at first, that we could do it at first. Climbing down was the hard part, which we completed without incident. Feeling empowered, we began our own rock balances on the wall to the north.
The Man combines 2 Boynton Canyon activities: rock balancing in a tree.
The first time I visited this site was with the rabbit and the fox. The rabbit was in an anxious mood because of a sign mentioning bears in the area. A strange forest spirit in the guise of an old hippie offered us heart shaped rocks along with a lecture on the power of positive thinking and all encompassing love. The same man gave us rocks on this trip. “A gift of love from mother earth,” is his greeting.
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