I made this cute tree with 3-dimensional books for in interior bulletin board, so it should last a while. I’ve done a similar design in the past, but this time I cut the leaves out individually with the decorative scissors. The Girl (now 18, so a woman) was in town that week (she left town early in the pandemic) and she came and helped me make the books, which are just folded paper scraps and staples.
This is something I’ve been thinking about since I finished the feigned glass windows: feigned glass light box. Michael’s had some tiny shadow boxes that they were, of course, sold out of, but I got this bigger box and The Man cut a hole in the back and installed the LEDs.
I used clear plastic for a background and sealed the whole thing with the clear plastic as well, and the rest of the design is scrap pieces from the original project, except for the bats, which are heavy cardstock that I painted purple. I used hot glue to stick affix the panel to the box and then more hot glue to seal the edges with ribbon.
This particular box was created to be a birthday present.
Definitely want to do some more experimentation with this type of thing but I have to find a good (affordable) source for the boxes and the lights.
There is a long and glorious history of mobile libraries powered by sure-footed donkeys, delivering books to people in remote or undeveloped areas where readers have no other access to texts, so when the librarian asked me to decorate the cart she intended to use to bring books to classrooms on days when the library is inaccessible to students, I knew I wanted to make this donkey-drawn bookmobile to pay homage to the most literate members of the asinine species.
Total run time was probably just over 2 hours. The school counselor helped me laminate it so it should last for a while.
Just a little window dressing I knocked up so there GATE program bulletin board didn’t look so forlorn. I forgot it’s slightly bigger than my bulletin board and my design is a bit small (I cropped it here) and the lettering is wonky but the gate and the hummingbirds are sound.
It’s a bit pared down but my hands are still in recovery mode from the feigned glass windows (ultimately a ~30-hour job) and also it was 108° outside, the breezeway, where this bulletin board hangs. I use metallic paint pens rather than staples, because it’s easier and that cork is getting destroyed.
it’s the back of a lion. The Lineweaver Lions go back to school Thursday, and I drew a lion’s back. That is the whole gimmick.
i also knocked together another simple design so there wouldn’t be an empty bulletin board right at the beginning of the tour on parents’ night, which I’ll put in a separate post.
Whew! That’s a wrap on this project (more or less; I still have to add some latticework to cover the gaps but I’m glad to be done with the difficult part). Keen eyes will note some themes common to my work.
The whole thing took about 30 hours, a smidge under but will likely get to 30 with the latticework. My hand and my scissors are wrecked. I’m taking the scissors to be sharpened but my hand will just have to be endured.
We did the tech rehearsal last night and the whole thing looks even better with light streaming through the panels as intended.
Anyway, school starts next week so I have to go do my bulletin board now.
Whew! This second one took one about 5 or 6 hours, maybe half as long as the first one. Plus I didn’t have to wait for materials to be delivered. There should be enough of everything left to finish the third one in style (wish I had a *bit* more blue, but with care it should suffice).
This piece seemed to dictate itself. I had different ideas about how the color would play out, and for the geometric shapes as well, but then it sort of came together with way more yellow than I intended, with more complexity at the edges and less where I ended up using bigger pieces. But I think it looks great.
The person who commissioned it loves it so far, plus I got another commission today!
I can’t seem to figure out how to do captions on my phone; maybe I’ll edit it later. But the caption should read, “Google ‘lemniscate’ right now.”
This commission for the Coyote is part 1 of 3. I finished it last night, and would have finished it sooner, but it took 4 days for my materials to arrive. When I finally got the last bits assembled, they looked markedly different from the rest of the work because the glue wasn’t dry yet, so I waited another day to take the picture.
Needless to say, this was difficult to photograph and the true majesty of the colors does not come through. Everything is washed out and leaning toward green. The inside of the mouth is actually purple, but this seemed to be the best I could do with the light available.
The backing is a panel from a tent pavilion, like the kind you can easily set up on the beach or something. The colored part is transparent packaging wrap I got at Michael’s. Every color has a bunch of other colors in it, so you get different iridescent effects in different light, or by layering the colors. I made layers of colors with matte medium in between, which changed the way the light interacted with it. The metallic lines are 1/4″ silver washi tape. The entire work is about 6 feet long and 3 feet high.
This one probably took close to 12 hours because I had no idea what I was doing. The subsequent panels should be much quicker. This project highlights my commercial failings as an artist. Here I have invented and mastered a ridiculous technique that no one else is using, and which I will probably never use again.
Stand by for panels 2 and 3.
Yeah, I haven’t posted lately. All my equipment is messed up so I can’t do digital art until that’s sorted, the new BJC comic likely will NOT BE allowed out in public until 2025, and I have a new gig that pays money for my time.
I have started a new painting, and I have a potential new project that might materialize in 2024, and I have this fun activity—I’m helping transform this freestanding tent/pavilion thing into a church by creating faux stained glass windows with transparent plastic wrap and metallic washi tape.
It will be moderately NSFW.
It’s here at last! Volume 4 of Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics is now available from Michigan State University Press.
What’s that you say? This doesn’t look like an indie comic? Indeed, Michigan Salvage, edited by Lisa DuRose, Ross K Tangedal, and Andy Older is a academic collection, the first part of which contains scholarly writing about Campbell’s work, the second part of which includes pedagogical essays, and in between the 2, obviously, is a new BJC comic by yours truly, which, of course, straddles the scholarly/pedagogical divide.
In addition to the 15-page comparison of Q Road and Once upon a River, this volume also contains my 5-page comic lesson plan for teaching literary criticism to young people (every chapter has a corresponding lesson plan), as well as a chapter in the teaching section (“Fiction Friction: Teaching Bonnie Jo Campbell to Second Language Writing Students” by Doug Sheldon) that discusses using my previous comics to teach Campbell’s work.
Due to the…professional…nature of the book, I wasn’t able to share this work before publication (I actually did the bulk of it in 2020, during the first 2 months of lockdown) and I gather I still may not share too much of it here, but true fans will certainly want to purchase this lovely volume for their home collections. (It’s academic publishing, so I receive no compensation other than a contributor’s copy, but this was the most labor intensive comic yet; it took 250 hours.)
I made a lot of different decisions with this comic, which isn’t like the others; it’s more of a compare and contrast essay between the 2 novels rather than a simple retelling of short stories. It’s really text-heavy. But I’m pretty happy with it. There was a minor mix-up in the printing process that made the pages…less effective, but I’ve already received an apology and a promise that it will be rectified in the next printing.
And now…well, I really can’t say much about it, but I guess I can reveal that I have the final text for Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, forthcoming from WW Norton in 2024, right here on my very own computer. Like I really may not say much about it, but I think I can say this: it is going to blow people away. It’s going to be included on reading lists and win prizes and inspire articles and discussions. It’s going to make a huge splash. It’s going to have legs. It’s so good. And when it’s released in January of next year, Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics volume 5 will be there, scurrying after it.
Fans of Bonnie Jo Campbell and Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics will definitely want to buy this book. And if you don’t own the first 3 volumes of the comic, they can be purchased ($6 for 1, $10 for 2, $12 for all 3) from monica.ilene.friedman AT gmail DOT com.
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