They asked me if I would participate in Science Night and present an activity that combined science and art, so I’m doing snowflake cutting. I’ve wanted to teach a little class on this for a long time, actually. A lot of kids don’t seem to know about how much fun we had making things with our hands before the internet.
This poster presentation took a ridiculous amount of time, like 8 or 10 hours. It would have taken a quarter of that time and looked much sharper if I made it in Photoshop but it’s more fun making imperfect things with your hands.
I only made a couple real mistakes and I was able to mostly fix them.
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.
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.
I didn’t used to think of this sort of thing as art—it’s not like I made the beads; I just tied them to a piece of stretchy filament—but I suppose that’s like saying a painting isn’t art because I didn’t make the paint.
Probably I’ve mentioned this before, but I spent DECADES of my life hoarding art supplies. My family didn’t really value art (they said they did, but they didn’t; they valued capitalism and they didn’t think art was part of capitalism so therefore it was not as important as anything that resulted in a regular paycheck) and when I did receive art supplies it was impressed upon me that they were both expensive and frivolous and I must not waste them because nobody was going to replace things that I used up. And when I moved to my new place at the beginning of the pandemic I vowed to stop hoarding (what was I saving this stuff for anyway) and (after throwing out bags of unused but dried-out paying and markers) I began enjoying my massive collection of every kind of art supply.
Soooo…
Last Christmas I mentioned to the Coyote that I wanted the kind of tiny cut glass prism suncatcher that made rainbows everywhere. And he, being him, gave me 20 of them. So I had the idea to make an unconventional kind of beaded curtain with them, so my whole house would be filled with rainbows every day.
To that end I dug through the 2 drawers labeled “beads and shells” in my studio, and then went through the rest of the house, and came up with every little thing that could possibly be construed as a bead, and a few things that definitely weren’t beads in any sense but whatever, I’m going to tie them to these beads anyway. Then I sorted them by theme and tried to “tell a story” with each strand.
Some of these elements are quite old; many of them are things I’ve been carrying since the ’80s and a few of them are likely much older. For example, one of the “beads” is a broken ring that might be jade or malachite or turquoise and probably belonged to one of my ancestors. And then some of the elements are very new: the metal horse was randomly given to me by an artist at a street fair last year. I didn’t buy any beads for this project. Everything here was already in the house (except for the tension bar I used to hang them, and also I had to buy another roll of stretchy filament when I ran out halfway through). There’s old earrings and discards from the Bear’s shop and broken wind chimes and little art pieces I made in the ’90s and have kept in a box since then…
Here you can zoom in and see all the details.
If I had just used beads I expect this would have been easier and more relaxing but tying a bunch of random objects did make it a bit more complicated. Worth it, though, I think. It’s not really apparent from the photo, but I also used 12 colors of embroidery floss to tie them up so there’s another rainbow even when the sun isn’t shining through them.
For me, it’s harder to make art in a trashed space. I’m not comfortable doing it in a perfectly clean one either, but my brain doesn’t function as well if things are very messy, and frankly, my house had not been clean since before I had covid, which was a year ago. I paid Miss Kitty to do 5 hours of deep cleaning this week, and I did about 10–15 further hours, and then I was just standing there in my perfectly clean house looking at my perfectly empty table thinking, “O, wow, I can totally finish a project in this space!”
And I did. And it’s great. I picked up another project that I’d abandoned months ago and worked on that as well.
I actually had a few moments where the freedom of not-a-mess was so incredible that I almost cried
So my house is clean, my mind is clear, and every day is going to bring rainbows.
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.”
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.
COVID knocked me down, but I am slowly getting up again. It took me a lot of weeks to make this bulletin board, because I got the long COVID and it slows me down. One week I cut out all the flowers, but it was a while before I got to the lettering, which took 2 days, and then the girl also took 2 days. And I still forgot to give her a second leg. In this picture I also forgot to glue her hair down. If it was, you would see that her hair beads are rainbow.I know I’ve done 2 Robert Louis Stevenson poems in a row, but they spoke to me.
I guess it speaks for itself. Or it’s quiet for itself.
They gave me another bulletin board so I made this monach butterfly, which is a good choice for autumn in the desert. The monarchs breed here, especially if there is enough rain, and they are also thematically appropriate for Dia de los Muertos. There are people who attend the All Souls’ Procession dressed as monarchs, or in costumes covered with hundreds of (replica) monarchs.
I couldn’t think of a good tag or phrase or anything. Kept meaning to come back to it but I’ve moved on and I guess it’s fine by itself.
If you know me, you might know that I have a psychologically difficult time with the autumn in general. It’s nice to hold on to symbols like this.
Around the time I made this butterfly, some guy who didn’t know anything about seeking asylum in the US but felt compelled to make some ridiculous marks about it nonetheless boxed himself into a corner during an online discussion about the subject and, unable to make a cogent argument, resorted to looking at my profile and then, I guess, attempting to insult me personally. One of his remarks was, “I work for a living,” presumably meaning that art is not work. Even though I spend between 4 and 17 hours on every single on of these ephemeral paper works, and my back and hands hurt when I am done, and I have to take breaks due to the sheer amount of pain I’m in.
It’s odd that someone thinks “I work for a living” is a flex. When I hear that comment, my thought is, “You’ve a slave to capitalism and you’re proud of it.” Nobody I know thinks that working is a flex; everyone I know would prefer not to work, or, at least, not to work under the fist of capitalism.
How much nicer would the world be if we divided all tasks into “essential” and “voluntary,” and then EVERYONE did SOME of the essential tasks. It’s not right that there are people who do nothing, or who only work for their own enrichment without contributing anything of value to the world, and then there are people who carry the whole weight and are barely compensated. It makes no sense, for example, that schoolteachers work full time, plus many unpaid hours, with little support, for little money. Nobody should have a classroom of 30 kids they have to manage by themselves 5 days a week. Everyone with the inclination and skills should participate in educating kids; this is one of the most important jobs there are. Nobody should work 40+ hours a week in a factory, or a fast food restaurant, or as a plumber (unless they really, really want to). We should all share the crappy jobs, and then we should all have ample time for the fun ones. Nobody should get rich playing football or designing couture gowns, but everyone should have the opportunity to play football or design couture gowns, in the hours that they’re not doing essential jobs. That should be what civilization is about.
It’s true that I don’t get paid a lot. But I do work. I work harder than a lot of people. And I make the world a nicer place for a lot of them. But I guess I make it a less nice place for certain unbearable people.
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.
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