Tag Archives: Fall

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.