Tag Archives: birds

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.

Great Horned Owls, Autumn 2021

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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.

Rainbow Hummingbird

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I give myself very good advice

This morning I did a professional photoshoot (headshot type stuff for an organization’s website), after which the client wanted to see the raw images right away, which led me to realized that I had not uploaded anything off the DSLR since late spring, which meant I hadn’t posted this cool hummingbird I made for my end-of-year bulletin board (and school starts back up in like 3 weeks here!). So here it is: my rainbow hummingbird.

If you zoom in, there’s a lot of detail. I think this one took about 6 hours total over 3 days.

6 Paper Hummingbirds

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Little flying jewels are an artist’s conception and not scientifically accurate.

My school district went back to in-person learning after spring break, and I was there making my 2 banners, and a teacher of whom I’m fond seemed pretty stressed out getting her office back together. I told her I couldn’t help her (I had like 25 hours of work to do myself!) but I could offer her a leftover hummingbird I had in a drawer from some other long-ago project. She liked the hummingbird but indicated that she wished she had a pair of them. So I finally got around to making some pairs.

They didn’t come out exactly how I had imagined them but I think they’re pretty cute. I actually made (and kept) the templates so I can quickly cut out hummingbirds in the future, if I ever need to do that.

Running

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waoa 12 running_edited-2

I miss those ’90s flare low rise jeans, but I don’t miss belly shirts.

To me, “Running,” feels like the precursor to “Daughters of the Animal Kingdom,” with its discussion of motherhood versus not-motherhood and its frequent reference to animals. “Running” is rife with birds, and I could have drawn a bird in every panel, as I drew only animals in “Daughters of the Animal Kingdom,” but I got hung up on the part of the story that describes the pattern of a male wood duck as looking like a map of the world, because I kept looking at photos of male wood ducks and couldn’t see a map of the world in there. Plus, I really liked the juxtaposition of the prematurely aged mom smoking a cigarette while complaining about her daughter smoking cigarettes.

I also enjoyed drawing the redwing blackbird. Male redwing blackbirds are super territorial and will attack anything that remotely resembles another male redwing blackbird. My mother has a story about one attacking the head of my black-haired brother when he was little. As for panel 4: ducks are jerks. Duck rape is a thing. As for panel 5: I couldn’t fit many more baby ducks in there. I wanted to draw 40. In the last panel, I tried to illustrate the good form/bad form the narrator talks about in reference to running.

Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”

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IMG_7758

Will I be doing any more hand lettering in the immediate future? Quoth the raven, “Not tonight.”

This is Halloween! This is Halloween! Halloween! Halloween! La la la!

Pretty often, the Halloween design is the bulletin board I’m most looking forward to. This one definitely was. I knew I wanted a raven, so I knew I had to do Edgar Allen Poe. The sticking point there was picking the right stanza; the poem is a lot longer than I remembered. I guess it could have worked with just “Quoth the raven ‘Nevermore’,” but where’s the fun in that? You don’t get very much poetry in 4 words.

Then again, cutting 170 paper leaves with terrible plastic scissors was nothing compared to the 4 straight hours I spent inking this bad boy. The raven himself was fairly simple. I sketched him out on Monday, cut and pasted him Tuesday (lost a lot of time because the Girl had hours of math homework to get to), fixed him up a bit more on Wednesday and blocked out the letters (in true Halloween horror fashion, I lost a lot of time on Wednesday because the school had a freaking hard lockdown because there was an active shooter across the street; The Man says it was an accidental discharge but tell that to 400 crying children who have just spend the last hour hiding quietly under their desks in a dark classroom), sketched out the lettering on Thursday (lost more time because the Girl had conferences at a different school in the suburbs and also some jerkface kid had pulled out 30 or 40 staples and tried to peel the raven off), and then strapped myself into my iPod and went at it with a handful of permanent markers on Friday.

It was 4 hours straight with no more than a few minutes break here and there to stretch. Made a lot of mistakes toward the end. It is what it is. I don’t have a name for that font; it’s just something that came up when I Googled “fun Victorian fonts for kids” and started clicking.

Sadly, the kids are on autumn break, which is a thing here. I always wanted an autumn break was I was a kid, and was always told to shut up about it, that I didn’t need a break because school just started. Kids today are lucky with their autumn breaks and their regular early dismissal days. But not so lucky with their active shooter hard lockdowns. Anyway, good thing their break had already started and the teachers just had grading day, because there’s no way I would have finished this if I also had to deal with children.

Anyway, you can read the complete poem here, and you should if you haven’t.

Seriously, my hand hurts. Happy Halloween.

 

Dragon Comics 104

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And you forgot the ice water!

And you forgot the ice water!

This is the comic I would have posted last night, had I not been completely road burned from our epic drive through the Tonto Wilderness over the Mogollan Rim. I actually wrote the script last week; and it’s moderately ironic, because The Man and I were hiking in the desert on Sunday and even though we wore sunscreen, we both got burnt. I only burned a little, as my ancestry is Mediterranean and my whiteness comes with a decent amount of melanin all things considered. The Man, however, is of the Nordic persuasion and couldn’t be much whiter if he tried. His sunburn was especially hilarious because he wore a knee brace (on account of the 3 pins he got in his knee after driving a motorcycle into a guard rail) so he has a perfect red circle on his knee, inside a perfect white square. It’s a unique burn.

I helped him with the aloe.

Other than that and perhaps 1 or 2 tiny inconveniences associated with camping in a place with no services, if you catch my meaning (i.e. no plumbing), it was a stellar trip. We saw many wonderful creatures: jackrabbits, quails, egrets, herons, hawks, buzzards, and so on. Fish were literally jumping out of the lake. Flowers were blooming all over the desert. The weather couldn’t have been lovelier; ditto the scenery. We were on the north side of Lake Roosevelt, where no one goes unless they have a boat. We pretty much had to drive down a cow track to get there, and we had an entire cove to ourselves. So that makes up for the lack of plumbing.

The Trickster’s Hat Part 12

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People never listen anyway

People never listen anyway

Some of what Bantock strives to communicate in The Trickster’s Hat is the need to tell your inner critic to shut up. He’s quite right; it was that voice constantly insisting that my work wasn’t good enough that robbed me of the pleasure of intensive visual creation for big chunks of my life. Art is subjective, and I have to believe that it’s better to create something flawed than not to create anything at all.

Exercise 44 is intended as a visual reminder. Paint two parrots, one green and one red. Simple enough. My parrots were born in the space of under a dozen brushstrokes each. But then, the directions continue: paint a big, black X over their beaks. How sad! I was rather pleased with my parrots and did not want to obliterate their little faces. Rules are rules, but, engaging again with the spirit rather than the letter of the law, I poked some holes in the paper and tied their beaks shut instead, a much more elegant solution, and the parrots are silenced just the same.

The text just came to me then; it’s a bit of a joke. I have a few thousand books in my office, and while I had envisioned the room as my personal space, my husband and stepkids would rather hang out in here than in the other public spaces of the house. When the kids (and sometimes my husband) get rowdy, I’ll tell them, “Quiet in the library!” My stepdaughter protested at first, “It’s not a library.” “Oh, really?” I said. “Look around.” When my stepson saw the parrot poster, he said, “OK, that’s hilarious.”