Tag Archives: blue

Another Blue Morpho Why Not?

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You know what this design could use? More shades of blue!

This is from a couple weeks back: a commission to decorate a special ed classroom. There’s another piece I’ll highlight later.

If I hadn’t done the other blue morpho designs I might not have been able to figure this out, but I have a pretty good sense of how light interacts with iridescent surfaces now. It helped that the school changed suppliers for their butcher paper and I’d been hoarding the old blue, giving me 4 shades to work with. The lightest and darkest shades are butcher paper and the middle tones are construction paper. The color is not quite true but it still looks lovely. It’s hanging up in its forever home now.

Blue Dream Mandala

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Funny how those eyes seem to follow you across the room.

Happy New Year! This is a nice design to start 2017: it’s peaceful and calming. Right now, people seem angry and divisive. Everyone’s quick to point out everyone else’s flaws but no one wants to acknowledge their own faults, even if they’re the same problem. Especially if they both have the same problem. Meanwhile, the people they think they’re opposing are quietly profiting from the strife. I’m going to draw more mandalas, in pursuit of becoming more centered.

Today I rode my bike in the rain, because I’m tired of feeling middle aged. There were a bunch of kids riding their bikes in the rain, too, so I guess it worked. Of course, it shouldn’t be raining all day for days at a stretch in the desert but that’s another worry.

 

 

Blue Web Mandala

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Looks like a dropped a stitch on the bottom right. 

Whew! Busy weekend! The Man got a year older, which happens to people even when they’re so old no one really cares anymore, so I tried to jolly him up. Friday night we went to a carnival and Saturday night we went to a cabaret where he got to celebrate his birthday by being dragged onto stage by a troupe of belly dancers. I also accomplished 2 pieces of art in that time, but very few hours of sleep, so now I’m kind of goofy and unfocused, so I’m just tossing this slightly askew mandala up here and then trying to persuade my brain to turn off in the next couple hours.

Actually, I’m pretty pleased with the direction things are going. Sometimes I wonder if I can deliver on the things I promise but there’s no reason to believe I can’t. But then I wonder if that fear is the real reason I haven’t come as far as I wanted. Somehow, once other people’s money is involved, my self-confidence begins to question itself.

Star Scallop Mandala

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A little bit feathery, a little bit pointy. 

Productive weekend! Got a really nice comic finished for tomorrow, which is helpful, because tomorrow is the day I go to the Fox’s house and we sit and silence and write for 2 hours, and also the day that I volunteer at the elementary school, and I have another engagement as well, so that doesn’t leave a lot of time to make comics. Also got a good chunk of the next day’s comic started, which is helpful.

Also, I got a new phone, because my giant ZMAX died an ignominious death after an entire week of not really letting me play Pokemon Go. Sadly, they don’t make this kind of phablet anymore. The Man found one on Craig’s List but someone else got there first, so he bought me an LG, which will probably be OK, once I get everything arranged the way I like it. How anyone can not organize their icons by alphabetical order is beyond me.

This is a really pretty mandala, only slightly askew.

And that’s Labor Day weekend. There goes summer, once again. The autumn always gets me a little bit down, and it’s hard not to compare the year to my life, i.e. if my life were a meteorological year beginning in the spring, it would now also be the beginning of autumn. On the other hand, The Man and I went to the last late night of the season at the Desert Museum on Saturday, and in the weird fluorescent light of the bathroom, I thought I’d found my first gray hair. But it was just the lighting. So maybe it’s still the 4th of July.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Mandala

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Ooh...dimensionality through texturization

Ooh…dimensionality through texturization

There came a point at which I realized that the mandalas were starting to form patterns, which allowed me to deliberately mix those patterns up. I had mandalas with crystalline structure, and mandalas that look leafy and flowery, and mandalas that had creature elements. This one combine all the three. In the center a sort of garnet-y thing in purple and red, surrounded by a sort of a green lily pad, with a feathery blue edge that reminds me of a sea creature.

Been tinkering with the same comic all weekend. It’s closer, although I still don’t have the last panel. The illustrations are coming together, at least. So I’m drawing these pictures and trying to figure out why the ones that are supposed to be kids look like adults. And then I realize that kids have great big heads on their little tiny bodies. If you don’t give them enormous heads they just look like thin adults.

Anyway, I would have gotten further but The Man wanted to watch Boyhood with me. It’s a very long film. The concept is fascinating, though. Not only could then have no way of knowing what the child actors would look like at the end of the movie, they couldn’t have written certain scenes (like when the main character rants about Facebook) before they actually pitched the film. Not to mention the music. I neglected to take any of the vast quantity of OTC medications that have been keeping my sinuses from back up into my brain, so now I have a headache, too. Still, I’m going to try to get this comic at least 50% finished tonight. Otherwise tomorrow night I’ll going nuts either scrambling to finish it or to dash out some kind of filler comic.

Man, people better appreciate.

Blue Lotus Mandala

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Sometimes you just have to lay it on thick.

If you are interested in reading the unvarnished truth about my spiritual beliefs, someone has been inquisitive enough to interview me about it and industrious enough to type up the interview and post it on her blog. The timing is great, because it’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and a lot of the interview is about why I don’t practice Judaism even though I was raised in a traditionally observant household. Or perhaps because I was raised in a traditionally observant household. There may be a comic in there somewhere, although that might prove even harder to write about than the chronic pain disorder.

Clouds are my religion. Mountains are my religion. The bulletin board in the breezeway of the elementary school where I hang my cut paper projects is my religion. All these mandalas are my religion.

As for other people’s religions, there’s really only one thing that interests me, and that is their mythology. But there’s only one thing that’s really important, in the long run, and that is whether or not you follow Wheaton’s Law. If you think your divine creator is telling you it’s OK to be a jerk, you might want to examine whether your beliefs are spiritually uplifting or merely self-serving.

In Which I Relearn the Love of Alliterative Language

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If I seem a little prickly to you, maybe you shouldn't touch me.

If I seem a little prickly to you, maybe you shouldn’t touch me.

It eludes me why I never thought to post the mandalas on Mondays. Not only does #MandalaMonday make a more pleasing hashtag, it gives me an extra day to think about comics without being rushed when I’ve used the entire weekend up having fun and not thinking about the act of creation.

This one looks like a sea anemone to me, something that lives on a coral reef.

My trip to New Mexico was wonderful and cleansing, but the 7+ hour drive each way, mostly through the mountains, was pretty taxing on my body. I drank one of those dreadful 5-Hour Energies, which kept my mind so relentlessly focused on piloting a vehicle that 7 hours after we arrived my brain remained on alert to the sensation of hurtling through space. Driving that long wasn’t easy on the rest of me either, and I got very little sleep last night.

There should be a comic tomorrow, a silly one, and then maybe one of those brutal personal comics about the most painful things that have ever happened to me, which seem to be the ones that most interest readers.

The Trickster’s Hat Part 8

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Exercise 21 required 4 squares, lightly taped together. The collage was built on top of the squares, which were then cut apart and rearranged several times. I saved my favorite images for the top layer. Cutting the work up was a bit difficult, emotionally.

As mentioned before, this book calls for many collages. After a while they all sort of blur together and I didn’t enjoy many of the later ones. I wanted more drawing, more painting, less cutting out, less pasting.

Exercise 28 Part 1: a collage representing obligation

Exercise 28 Part 1: a collage representing obligation

Exercise 28 Part 2: a collage representing liberation

Exercise 28 Part 2: a collage representing liberation

The prompts were different, but I’m not sure the results were substantively so.

Exercise 30: a collage pairing words and images to tell a story, without the words and images necessarily relating to one another.

Exercise 30: a collage pairing words and images to tell a story, without the words and images necessarily relating to one another.

It became routine for me, to sit up at night chopping images from magazine and gluing them down.

Exercise 39: a collage comprised exclusively of blue parts, with a little green and purple added at the end. I have no idea which end was supposed to be up.

Some of them were uplifting, but toward the end I was just phoning them in and not getting much out of the experience.

Exercise 43: make a collage while listening to evocative music and smelling evocative scents. Not really any different than my regular process. But then again, there are visual thematic elements that seem inspired by something ephemeral and uplifting, so who knows?

Exercise 43: make a collage while listening to evocative music and smelling evocative scents. Not really any different than my regular process. But then again, there are visual thematic elements that seem inspired by something ephemeral and uplifting, so who knows?