Tag Archives: animals

Jackalope!

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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.

Tyger Tyger part 2

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Somehow I managed to carve out a couple hours to finish this thing before December swallows the clock whole! I start teaching again tomorrow, so that’s going to eat up my Tuesdays until May. I needed to get this thing done.

i feel like I slightly phoned it in. Mismeasured the last line so that’s annoying but what can you do? I mismeasured where I placed the tyger on the first board and had to truncate his tail. O well.

This is basically a joke for myself and the very few other people who are familiar with this poem AND my work. Because the poem is religiously themed. The whole book is about God, a mystic experience of God, but a Christian God, which I don’t believe in. Obviously, I don’t think my hand or eye are immortal, but the evidence is right here—it’s *my* hand and eye that framed this paper tyger’s fearful symmetry.

So that’s what I created. A meta-tyger to illustrate my mortal and two-dimensional fabrication of a tyger.

I doubt anyone at the school will get it or notice.

I had to go back after I finished and change the scissors. The scissors I was using at the time had black handles, so I made the paper scissors black as well, rendering them invisible against the black background. I hastily patched red handles on top when I realized my mortal mistake, so the second pair isn’t quite as perfectly aligned with the hands and blades as the first, but I think this scans.

Behold! The 13-Lined Ground Squirrel!

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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.

Fantasia in the Dust

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I think this one speaks for itself.

I haven’t posted in a while because I spent a couple months working on this commission! And now it’s finally done and the client said it’s OK for me to share, and I’m very excited to share.

This image, which took me about 50 hours over the space of 2 1/2 months to draw, is going someplace I likely will never go, Burning Man. (Some of it sounds fun, but not so much fun that I’m giving up indoor plumbing for 10 days.) It will be a room wrap, hanging inside a box van. The full size image is about 2 feet high and 8 feet long, but when vectorized and printed on a tapestry, it will be about 8 feet high and 30 feet long. (I would have drawn it full scale but my 5-year-old MacBook started complaining when the file was ~4’x15″ and the client said they would vectorize it themself, so I took pity on the machine; I do not know how to vectorized images). The person who bought it will be able to sleep inside their kawaii rainbow animal fantasy.

I actually have another commission I should finish next week, and I will share that one too, although it’s substantially less interesting than this one. And after that, there will be a new bulletin board! And I even have a comic script all laid out and ready to illustrate. I will try not to let the blog lay dormant this long again.

Toad and Toadstool

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When you look into the toad’s eyes, you can see god.

A birthday card for Mx. Kitty, psychonaut and psychedelic researcher:  a Sonoran Desert toad (Invilius alvarius) and some fly agaric (Amanita muscaria).

The toad, the mushrooms, and the grass are butcher paper; the background is tissue paper and origami paper. Everything is affixed matte medium, except the spots on the mushroom and the toad’s eyes, which are tacky glued. The black details on the toad are ink.

Old Dogs

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Cutting it all the way down here.

There’s two sides to this short, slice-of-near-death story, and this comic reflects one a lot more vividly than the other. It’s a flash piece, just a single moment of almost no action that generates volumes. We have a room and we have characters: three old women and four old dogs. They don’t have heating oil, yet, but they do have firewood, and blankets, and sweaters, and each other. They’re still alive. Aside from the heat, they have booze, nicotine, and sugar. They are living in poverty, but they could be poorer still. Things are not so bad. There’s a quality of warmth to the moment.

At the same time, these characters are huddled together for protection. They are not related, don’t seem to have family to care for them in their dotage, and they’ve come together by necessity to survive a cold world. The last dog, the one with 3 legs who can’t get up on the couch, is the closest to the cold, although the story intimates that it could be the fat collie who dies first, if it ever gets incontinent and they have to put it outside.

Meanwhile, the plastic on the window has come loose, and the cold is invading their warm oasis while they doze. The same image is used in “Bringing Belle Home,” to symbolize Belle’s utter inability/unwillingness to take care of herself. The women in “Old Dogs” are on their own.

Gorilla Girl

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Civilization is overrated.

“Gorilla Girl,” raw with emotion and rich with meaning, offers a protagonist who may consider herself a member of the animal kingdom, but is a great deal more self-aware than a lot of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s characters. She knows, at least, who she is and what she wants to do, and she recognizes opportunities when they arise and seizes upon them.

I’ve read this story many times in the last 15 years and I can’t believe that only as I found myself stuck on how to present the scenes at the circus did I see the parallels to Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, a book that had a profound influence on me as a young adult. Of course, Harry Haller, as a young man, has voluntary ties to his middle class upbringing and is torn between his 2 natures. Our Gorilla Girl, young and without male privilege, is moderately tied to convention by love of her mother but primarily by the lack of mobility and freedom offered to young girls. Her crisis may be less pronounced due to her temporal environment, but more pronounced due to her gender. Her struggle is not whether to give the beast reign or to settle down in a comfortable bourgeoisie existence, but only when and where to give the beast reign.

My first thought in tackling this story was to highlight my immediate reaction that it should be read as a universal tale of female rage, that all Americans socialized female contain within themselves this exact anger, the despair at being restricted by virtue of gender, the sense of alienation by an oppressive civilization that imposes a dull domesticity on a vibrant animal nature, but then I’m not sure if that’s me projecting. Clearly, not all women bristle against the edict to be beautiful and well-groomed and mannerly and acceptable/approachable. Some of them seem happy to become the thing my mother so desperately wanted for me, the thing that neither I nor the protagonist could hope to emulate, let alone assimilate. After Jill from “Boar Taint,” Gorilla Girl is the Bonnie Jo Campbell character with whom I most relate, although I have found other—ahem—outlets for my animal nature and made a truce with objective reality. I leave it to the reader to choose: is Gorilla Girl an anomaly, a freak who can only thrive in the carnival, or is she ubiquitous, an expression that all women carry with varying degrees of comfort and ease?

Laughing Deer

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I don’t know if that deer is laughing at me or with me.

You know you’ve spent too much time on the Wacom tablet when you try to control-Z a piece of paper.

This is just a quick sketch I did before I went to Florida (I’m back now) based on a selfie I took the week before. Although I still have some Dragon Comics to finish, I’m also working more in pencil lately, trying to be less dependent on the tablet and Photoshop. Been working on a big project that might take the rest of the year, but still trying to update this blog semi-regularly. Seriously, I drew this picture just to remind myself that I could draw.

The original photo was taken at a place called Rooster Cogburn’s Ostrich Ranch, about 45 minutes north of Tucson. It’s a tourist attraction petting zoo where you can feed little deer, miniature donkeys, goats, sheep, bunnies, parakeets, lorikeets, ducks, and sting rays. I might be missing some creatures. Oh, yeah, the stupid ostriches, which I ignore, because the rest of the attraction is much more fun. You get a lot of joy for $10. The deer are my favorite, but the sting rays are pretty cool. And the bunnies are bunnies.

Spring Is the Mischief in Me

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And then you have to read the next couple lines in the poem.

With the comic finally put to bed, 11 days late, I managed to get a seasonal bulletin board up; the image hadn’t been changed since mid-December and now it’s basically spring in Tucson, even though the weather has been unseasonably cold.

The quote is from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” which was first published 104 years ago, yet presciently questions the point of a meaningless wall.

The letter art for the word “spring” is all original, of course, although I did look at some animal alphabets for inspiration on the S and the G. The S is supposed to be a vermillion flycatcher, the P is a lemon bud, the R is a monarch butterfly, the I is a desert marigold, the N is a long-suffering saguaro, and the G is a gecko. The small block letter are just the easiest style to cut by hand, and the lettering of “mischief” is based on a Harry Potter inspired font called “Mischief Managed.” The other animals are a hummingbird, a jackrabbit, some kind of fish, and a gambrel’s quail. I feel like it needed more animals, but The Man wanted me at home and the school is closed until Monday (in Tucson we don’t celebrate President’s Day, but we get 2 days for Festival of Vaqueros: the rodeo).

Maybe I should go back Monday and give the rabbit some whiskers, and take a better picture. We’ll see. My massage therapist also suggested that I should let my creating hand rest a little bit.