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.
One of the GATE teachers liked my owl bulletin board so much she gave me a book called October, October by Katya Balen, which prominently features an owl, although that owl is a baby barn owl and my original owl was an adult great horned owl (inspired by a juvenile great horned owl). I wanted to make her a little owl card but baby barn owls are kind of ugly so I drew an adult.
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.
It was such a big, white space! This one gave me a lot of trouble too, mostly because I needed to fill it up. I drew a bunch of different flowers that I hated and never finished before I got inspired to do these giant stylized dandelion puffs, which are excellent and magical.
This image pretty much expresses the state of the union, to my mind. It’s been a while since I drew a political cartoon. Almost precisely 8 years. It takes a lot out of you. And I did this the old fashioned way, no help from Photoshop.
This Saturday, April 5th, well over 1,000 protests are expected all across America. Either you know why or you’re part of the problem. I’m glad to live in a city where 75% of the people get it.
I made this sign 2-sided because we’re not going to let the bastards grind us down.
I don’t know what you call this sort of thing. Windows? Tiny pix? To me it feels sort of related to zentangle but it’s obviously different.
I just had this piece of paper that I had folded into thirty-seconds trying to explain something to somebody, and it was sitting on the table next to a golf pencil I had for some reason, and I started to fill in the boxes. I was going to do the other side but it looked like someone had spilled coffee on it, which is weird because I don’t drink coffee.
Anyway a little thing. I’ve been working on a big thing I may share here next week even though it’s not *exactly* mine. I’ll explain later. Or not.
The windows are (left to right, then top to bottom):
This is another commission that I drew quite some time ago but didn’t have permission to share until now, and it is the map of the fictional town of Whiteheart and environs as described in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s forthcoming (WW Norton, January 2014) novel, The Waters, which is an excellent novel that you should pre-order from you local independent bookstore or library.
As for the map, it took me a goodly time to figure it out. Originally she asked if I could do it in the style of the famous “View From 9th Avenue” New Yorker cover, and I did start out with a more conscious imitation, but as the project progressed, it sort of expanded in all kinds of direction that took it further and further away from that aesthetic (including changing from a portrait to a landscape orientation). Plus, to fit the aesthetic of the novel, I needed to fit a lot of plants and animals. And the roads and the sizes of things and their relationship to other things grew murky. I just had to make choices and roll with them and I’m all in all pretty pleased with the result, but also I wish it could have been twice as big and a little more technically accurate. There are so many more things I could have drawn.
Fun anecdote: in early drafts, a raven appeared in the top right of the map, but the raven didn’t make the final edit of the story, and the very last change I was asked to make was to replace him with some mosquitoes. Hilariously, following a series of events that began with me getting COVID, my MacBook could no longer pair with my Wacom tablet, and I was under deadline…so I drew those mosquitoes with one finger, using the touchpad. Do not recommend. I ended up replacing the MacBook with a Lenovo Yoga 9i, which is a far superior machine. The keyboard of that MacBook was a crime against Apple customers. It was literally an impediment to writing.
Anyway, this map, in a slightly altered configuration, will theoretically serve as the frontispiece of the novel (I say theoretically, because it did not appear in the ARC, and I believe things when I see them) which should be a great feather in my cap. Typically, major publishers only work with in-house artists, but Bonnie Jo went to bat for this map, and as far as I know, it will be there.
It’s always something and it’s usually right behind you.
Just a little scribble that could probably be a comic if I didn’t think that whatever was going on here is probably not funny. Can’t help but think that this drawing means something, but it’s hard to articulate what that might be. I certainly was not trying to draw anything like this.
Sometimes it do be like that: a little off kilter, ragged around the edges, and with the lines from something you husband drew on the back of the paper showing through in the corners.
I wasn’t planning on posting this image, or the image in my next post, but my brother saw them on my desk and wanted to know why not, and I didn’t have any particular reason. I used to post mandalas and dragons all the time. There’s no reason why not, except that the last couple years have been sort of detrimental to my health as an artist.
For the last 8+ weeks I’ve been working my way through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which is a sort of an emotionally painful and psychologically brutal. I used to say that drawing mandalas could help you view the state of your spirit, and this one—complicated and colorful but off-kilter and imperfect—seems to follow that pattern. Even before I started the book, I’d been working on playing—making art fun again instead of a job—and this mandala and the dragon drawing I have slated for later in the week are part of that.
I’m fully vaccinated and will be clear for hanging out with other fully vaccinated people on the 30th. I can’t help but feel like if my spirit had been in a better place, this pandemic would have been a much more productive time for me. I did create some things, but not as many as I would have liked. And now my time is going to fill up with other people again. But here we are: the world keeps moving.
This card is from my stepdaughter’s birthday a couple weeks ago, before the end of the civilization as we know it. It’s fanart from a newish Netflix cartoon called Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, about a post-apocalyptic Earth where most of humanity lives in underground burrows because the surface is rules by mutant animals. If you are trapped in your own home and enjoy that sort of thing, I highly recommend it.
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