This is a just a little thing I threw together to cover the extra bulletin board last week. I’ll probably replace it with a Halloween-themed one pretty soon.
A Little Boost
Leave a reply
The Hungry, Hungry Book Drop
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.
Welcome Quack
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.
5 Silver Paper Feathers
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.
Another Rainbow Unicorn Sloth
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.
Another Fine Logo FTW
Up to this point, every logo commission I’ve gotten, the client has said, “Please draw me X and Y and make it Z,” and then I drew the thing they described and was done. For this logo, commissioned by an Independent Catholic charitable organization that feeds unhoused people…that did not happen.
The client showed me another logo they liked as a suggestion, but didn’t want to me to copy it or anything. Then we had a long discussion about the whole thing and I drew a totally different logo they didn’t like, and then this one. And the client said, “It’s just what I had in mind even though I didn’t know it.” So yay!
Logo design services start at $300.
We know we axolotl you…
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.
The Pencil Eaters Volume 1!
As mentioned before in this blog, the way I live is that I think of insane things and then I do them. And 2 years ago I had the insane idea of producing a literary journal written entirely by 8–10 year olds. Couldn’t get it rolling last year, but AMAZINGLY it came together this year.
it’s 80 pages long, it’s got poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama, and it’s also illustrated by the kids. It took them over 6 months to create and it took me about 30 hours to slap it into its final form. (I typed their work in Google Docs and laid it out in Photoshop. I made a lot of mistakes (typos and such and apparently lost 2 poems 😔) but I did my best and I think the kids appreciated it.
Obviously, they chose the title.
We celebrated with a release party and literary reading this afternoon. Now I’m thinking about how I can improve it next year. I’m hopefully we can get volume 2 professionally printed because stapling 100 of these things was not fun. But it’s always nice to finish a big project.
16 Little Worlds
I don’t know what you call this sort of thing. Windows? Tiny pix? To me it feels sort of related to zentangle but it’s obviously different.
I just had this piece of paper that I had folded into thirty-seconds trying to explain something to somebody, and it was sitting on the table next to a golf pencil I had for some reason, and I started to fill in the boxes. I was going to do the other side but it looked like someone had spilled coffee on it, which is weird because I don’t drink coffee.
Anyway a little thing. I’ve been working on a big thing I may share here next week even though it’s not *exactly* mine. I’ll explain later. Or not.
The windows are (left to right, then top to bottom):
- The Sonoran Desert
- Tropical Island with Hammock
- Wetlands
- Pine Forest
- Flowery Meadow
- Rainbow Field
- Tree with Garden Swing
- The Seashore
- Under the Sea
- Lush Bike Path
- Small Boat on Stormy Ocean
- Mountains
- Thunderbird
- Mushroom Undergrowth
- Butterfly Meadow
- Turtle
A Sweet Little Elephant
I recently visited my mother-in-law in her new home and I noticed she had a bunch of elephant pictures on the wall and I was like, “I didn’t know you liked elephants.” (I mean seriously, I have known her for 15+ years; I had no idea she loved elephants. I feel unobservant.)
Like all humans from the great state of Kansas, she also likes sunflowers. I’m pretty sure they don’t even let you rent an apartment in Kansas if you don’t like sunflowers.
Anyway, I had to send her an elephant. The background is watercolor. The elephant is specialty paper. I made the sunflower by cutting petal shapes out of a picture of some other yellow flowers in a magazine.
qwertyvsdvorak 