This banner was many weeks in the making, not because I spent a lot of time working on it, but because i spent so much time working on other things. There’s a lot to do in a library. So I stayed late twice this week and, I confess, cannibalized the flowers from another project completed some years back. Sometimes I save pieces of old bulletin boards. That saved a lot of time.
No idea what inspired the catterflies.
i took like 2 dozen photos of this little ornament I made for my mom and none of them came out very well, so I’m just posting this one with the caveat that it’s not a very good photograph. But I think it’s a pretty cute ornament.
Originally, I wanted to buy something like this, but I couldn’t find anything I liked well enough. Everything was either very ugly or very overpriced or both. And I’m not saying these are perfect, but I like them better than most of the things I saw in the stores, and I liked the price better as well.
The hummingbirds bodies are polymer clay, about an inch and a half long, and their beaks are wire. I found an old mother of pearl earring that looked kind of like a wing, and then threw in that purple bead for good measure. The designs are painted with acrylic paint. I found just enough of this red ribbon to hang this ornament, and then to tie a bow on the box that I put the ornament in.
I find that fascism is really crushing my creative spirit. It’s hard to take pleasure in making things anymore. It feels like work. There’s not a lot of joy left, but I also feel like if I don’t make things, then the fascists win.
My mom really liked her tiny birds.
One of the GATE teachers liked my owl bulletin board so much she gave me a book called October, October by Katya Balen, which prominently features an owl, although that owl is a baby barn owl and my original owl was an adult great horned owl (inspired by a juvenile great horned owl). I wanted to make her a little owl card but baby barn owls are kind of ugly so I drew an adult.
That’s this owl.
This one took 5 days! I mismeasured the letters in both directions so you really have to view the first 2 of these boards together because the text cut off in the middle and spills over.
Sometimes art is about forging forward regardless of existing mistakes.
Last week the Coyote and I were skinny dipping when suddenly the sky opened up in a much needed monsoon burst, so we heaved ourselves out of the pool and took cover under the porch, from which vantage porch we observed a juvenile great horned owl appearing to dance in the rain for 5 or 10 minutes.
The Coyote told me that this behavior is intended to keep their wings from being saturated so they can still fly even though they’re wet, but it did look like a lot of fun. Joyful.
I actually made the third panel first, and I absolutely delighted myself with every detail.
I was almost finished Friday and I potentially could have stopped but there was too much blank space, so I came back and added the stars and the blooms.
The feathers and the brooms all have 3-dimensional details that the kids may very well destroy but that’s what happens when you make ephemeral art for elementary students.
The Girl, who is now a young woman working on her mother’s hydroponic farm, asked me to draw this gag, which I did, 98%, and then just…forgot? It’s the brain fog.
I love this joke because it is accessible to an absolute tiny percentage of people. But it is very relevant if you like internet memes and you work on a hydroponic farm.
So, the thing about true cryptids is that they’re all made up. Some cryptids turn out to be real animals, but most of them reside in the collective unconscious, inspired, I believe by the intersection of the natural world with the boundaries of human knowledge. The jackalope, as far as I can tell, is a 20th century cryptid, created, I’m guessing, to sell southwestern merchandise, and perhaps to share the mystique of the desert and inspire romantic thinking about the region. It may not have the same glorious history as some fantastic creatures, but it holds a place in the hearts of many.
I was asked to create banners for the seven columns in the library, and when I asked what I should depict on the banners, I was told “I don’t know. A mix of realistic and magical?” What’s a more appropriate mixture of realism and magic, than a taxidermied bunny with antlers sewn to it?
I wish I could say there was a greater meaning behind this mythology, but I just don’t think there is. I think someone just made it up for marketing purposes.
But I love it, and the kids seem to like it too. One of them told me his nickname at home is Jackalope, and he was quite touched by the homage.
More to come, of course.
The author Dawn Burns asked me to create an illustration for her short story, “Letter from the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo,” which will appear in her forthcoming collection, A Green Glow on the Horizon: Tales from the National Association of Tourist Attractions Survivors (Cornerstone Press, 2026).
The book and the story are forthcoming. It’s not entirely clear whether this illustration will also be forthcoming in the actual book. But I had a little inspiration after reading it and created something I really love.
The otters are based on a photograph I took at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in 2022. He was doing these elaborate backflips every time he passed the underwater viewing window, and I saw the golden ratio in this one. My entire conception of the illustration was centered around that memory.
The purple plastic gorilla cup gave me the most trouble. I vaguely recalled their existence but not well enough to accurately reproduce one, and I couldn’t find a single photo anywhere on the internet. Believe me, I tried. I spent as much time looking for an example of a purple plastic gorilla cup from the 20th century as I did drawing the rest of the picture. My google-fu is powerful and I usually find what I’m looking for, but these cups were instant trash the moment you finished consuming their sugary contents. I doubt anyone saved one let alone posted a photograph of it 40 years after the fact. So I kind of had to make them up. These are not the plastic purple gorilla cups that you would get at the zoo in the ’80s and ’90s, they are just a tribute to those cups.
Threw this one together in record time. Last night I thought I would get up early and go in and do this work and finish early and leave. But then I thought, “Hey, it’s August 1. I should look at the calendar to see what I’ve got going on this month.” And I realized I had a doctor’s appointment in the morning. And then I didn’t get to sleep until almost dawn and had to get up and run to this appointment and then have breakfast afterward, around the time most people are finishing lunch.
Blah blah blah, didn’t get in until 2:30, the air conditioning still isn’t fixed so it was 90° in there, and it was “Meet the Teacher” day so it was a total madhouse with hundreds of people wandering around.
Still managed to knock this out in under 4 hours. It’s not fancy but it does the job.
I knew last night I was going full rainbow on this one. I showed the background to the librarian before I did the letters and she loved it and I said, “I’m being very subversive” and then her daughter said, “You made a Pride flag,” and then I said, “Shh, we can’t say that,” and she said, “Why not?” and I said, “Because some people are humorless.”
“Humorless” in this case is a euphemism for “bigoted asshats.”
Anyway, the office manager loved it and it really makes huge impact on the space. And also, little queer kids will know.
If you can believe it, school starts Monday.
I can’t quite believe it but I decided to act like I did and get the breezeway ready. Originally I intended to come back today (Thursday) but then in Monday I decided I didn’t want to be rushed, and good thing, too. Because it turned out that not only would I be decorating all 3 bulletin boards in the breezeway again, they also wanted me to do the one by the principal’s office.
I didn’t have any huge inspiration but I decided I wanted to make a hibiscus and then it just made sense to go along with that theme. Which is hilarious because the breezeway is, of course, in the Sonoran Desert. But it’s frankly as humid as a tropical rain forest this week. So that’s cool.
I could have made MORE FLOWERS or made the flowers fancier or added smaller leaves or other design elements, but I had to go feed the Bear’s cat and then I had to give Miss Kitty a yoga lesson and ALSO I still have a whole day of work on that fourth board tomorrow. A dragon’s gotta pace dragonself.
The lettering is based on the De Latto font. The leaves are monsteras.
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.
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