It didn’t quite match the vision in my head but on the whole I’m pretty pleased with this card. The lettering is basically balanced and the cat is pretty cute. I got some very wonderful new art pens and all the fine lines are from that set, and then the thick ones are Sharpies.
Our school mascot is a lion and this card is for the outgoing librarian, who sadly had to leave yesterday. But hopefully she carries the spirit of the lion with her wherever she goes.
I went to a birthday party for the Coyote’s mom who turned 97! She was a famous beauty (literally) in the 20th century and she also was known for drawing little mousies, so I tried to draw this bombshell mouse in her style. Big hair, little red dress, and a champagne toast
I’m partially satisfied with my success. It was a busy week and I didn’t feel well and it was left to the last minute and I guess I fell asleep before i finished and had to color it in the car on the way to Phoenix. So possibly could have been better. But she loved it. I also gave her a snowflake, one of the best ones I’ve cut since my snowflake workshop.
I gave the rest of the snowflakes to the librarian.
Usually, things come together for me. Occasionally they don’t. Sometimes I give up.
i spent 2 days trying to make nephling number 3 a 3-dimensional card with an electric guitar with real strings but I couldn’t find a satisfactory way to attach the strings and after the 7th time they fell out I gave up and drew a 2-dimensional electric guitar, which I am also not happy with. But camp is only 2 weeks long and if I didn’t actually mail them something they wouldn’t actually receive it.
So this is something I made that never aligned with my vision and I had to just accept it as it was and call it finished. And that was the whole “giving up on perfection” part of my artistic process that allowed me to create all the stuff in this blog. Sometimes you have to call it “done” or “good enough” even if you don’t feel like it is.
I started a big (like 2′ x 4′) painting but it will probably be some time before that’s finished. I’m working on a nonfiction book, a sort of biography about the Coyote’s life. It’s a very interesting life. I mostly know the whole story by heart because GOLLY does that guy like to talk and if he can’t think of something new to say he just returns to his greatest hits. Fortunately, it’s a very interesting life. Most of the book is about the parts I was in, but he was 55 already when I met him.
There’s this other thing I want to share here, about my relationship to art, but perhaps that’s another post.
I recently visited my mother-in-law in her new home and I noticed she had a bunch of elephant pictures on the wall and I was like, “I didn’t know you liked elephants.” (I mean seriously, I have known her for 15+ years; I had no idea she loved elephants. I feel unobservant.)
Like all humans from the great state of Kansas, she also likes sunflowers. I’m pretty sure they don’t even let you rent an apartment in Kansas if you don’t like sunflowers.
Anyway, I had to send her an elephant. The background is watercolor. The elephant is specialty paper. I made the sunflower by cutting petal shapes out of a picture of some other yellow flowers in a magazine.
Some people are islands, not in the sense that they stand completely alone, unaffected by anyone around them (that’s not even a apt metaphor; islands are obviously impacted by the weather, the water, geothermal activity, and climate change) but in the sense that they offer safety and security in otherwise inhospitable situations. If you’ve been treading water for so long you can’t keep your head up for another moment and are in danger of going under for good, an island is exactly what you need to survive.
My mom was recently admiring my fishy switch plate so I thought I’d make her something in a similar style for a birthday card, but I decided on a turtle, because she also likes those little folksy Mexican bobble head turtle things. I don’t know what they’re called.
The turtle’s body is cut from a single image of a hibiscus and the shell is an ad for fiber or something like that. I love how hexagons tesselate, even though these ones are imperfect.
I brought this card to the library, where my parents were presenting a science program about electricity for little kids on my mom’s birthday, because that is how my parents roll.
This is just a little card/polymer clay combo I put together for The Man’s birthday. He will always be The Man and he will always need a little sunshine.
It’s my dear friend, the Vampire Bat’s, birthday, and I made her this card to amuse her. The background is layered tissue paper, the bat is brown butcher paper, and the starts are holographic foil, but the holographic part didn’t really seem visible once I started cutting. O well. I went back and forth over whether the bat should be black or brown and probably black would be better but it’s already in the mail so that’s that. Hopefully it reaches its destination before my friend’s birthday.
Pretty often I forget people’s birthdays entirely so sending a card 5 days in advance is pretty good.
Well, the new baby is like 8 months old now, but I made this little card when he was newer. Baby Amiel will be bilingual—his mother is American and his father is Spanish—so I wanted to make the card bilingual too. A is for alligator and apple in English, and árbol and abeja and amor in Español. Also, Amiel’s middle name is Willow so that tree is doing double duty.
Wow, it’s been so long since I’ve posted something here that WordPress actually logged me out of the site. That never happens.
I have made some art, but most of it was for a book that hasn’t been published yet and the editors asked me not to share it yet. But also, the world is on fire (here in Arizona literally, and figuratively everywhere else) and it’s hard to focus. I’ve been reading a lot.
This card is for my father, who loves cactus, for Father’s Day. By the time this page is published, I’ll have given it to him in a socially distant way. Happy Father’s Day, Dad!
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