Tag Archives: autumn

Summoning the Autumnal Spirit Triptych 2025, with Great Horned Owl and Amanita

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.

Fall Festival Bulletin Board 2

And here is the sister bulletin board. It’s slightly bigger than the original and I definitely wish I had had more time to fill it up.

I also wish I’d had time to make the stems curlier.

Anyway, let it not be said that I didn’t do my part in preparing the school and the students for autumn.

Fall Festival Bulletin Board 1

OK, so as mentioned in my last post, I now have control of the second bulletin board again, and finally I had the chance to coordinate the 2, in this case with a harvest theme: gourds and mushrooms. I don’t know. That’s what came out.

I’m making 2 separate posts even though they’re linked.

I’m pretty happy with the gourds and mushrooms, but I would have been happier if I had more time. I lost a couple days because the AC has been out since May and it’s kind of unbearable in there most of the time, and then I was called away to Kansas for family stuff. So I really jammed to get these up in 2 days.

If I had had more time I would have made more gourds and mushrooms. Some of them I spent a lot of time making and some I dashed out, but they all look OK, I think.

Of course, Arizona is experiencing record-breaking heat, and even Kansas is pretty warm and not at all autumnal.

Great Horned Owls, Autumn 2021

Owls say, “Time to get spooky!” Just kidding. Owls say, “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” all night long

Aside from the logistical issue of having to use small sheets of black construction paper to make up for the weird lack of large rolls of black butcher paper (sorry, but light gray just won’t cut it for Halloween/All Souls/Dia de los Muertos season; this is the dying of the light we’re talking about here, not the general malaise of the light) this one came out pretty close to perfect.

I was inspired by the vast number of great horned owls in this neighborhood; I never see them, but I have frequently heard them and occasionally found their feathers. They’re definitely around. I’ve even heard them in a tree on the school property, although I used for my model and different, more photogenic, and creepier tree two blocks down the street.

Weirdly, none of the pictures came out great, but I did get some nice details of the owls, which I might put on Instagram. You can find me @hubris_and_smoke. It’s mostly photos of flowers but there’s other fun stuff too.