Tag Archives: hand lettering

The Desert Year Part III

Leave a reply

This is obviously just the attribution to the quote, and I was kind of out of steam. But the cactus came out cool. I made the saguaros wavy because that’s actually how they look when it rains. They store up so much water they get little rolls like fat. When they don’t get any rain, they shrivel up and get skinny and look sad. I like them fat and jolly like this.

The prickly pear has one pad shaped like heart, because when you go among prickly pears, there’s always one pad shaped like a heart.

Usually I guess I go a little brighter for the summer bulletin board, but overall I’m satisfied. I know it’s not summertime for most of the country yet, but it’s definitely summertime here in the desert.

The Desert Year II

Leave a reply

This is the second part of the Joseph Wood Krutch quote from A Desert Year. This image is also kind of minimalistic compared to my other work, and the photo also doesn’t quite do it justice.

If you zoom in you can see that the raindrops have a sort of Eric Carle thing going on. I wanted then to look sort of luminous and I thought I could use use the metallic markers on the black paper but that wasn’t bright enough. So I colored a variety of blues with a bit of green and purple to cover a bit of white paper and cut the raindrops from that, and the effect is pretty good. I added some staples to make it look wetter.

The Desert Year Part I

Leave a reply

The Desert Year is a lovely piece of naturalist writing originally published in 1952, by a professor named Joseph Wood Krutch. He wasn’t a desert dweller—he was an east coast guy—but he came out to Tucson once and found himself enchanted. So when his next sabbatical came around, he took a year to immerse himself in the Sonoran Desert, joyfully observing the land, the climate, the flora, and the fauna, and recording his observations into this classic work of nonfiction.

These bulletin boards are a bit bare compared to some of my work. I’m not sure this picture does the “clouds” justice. I was trying to make them look textured , with a silver lining. It’s more clear in real life. I could have done more. But I’m presenting my comic to the American Literature Association conference this week and I needed to be reasonable with my time. I was trying to finish this Friday but I lost an hour dealing with my insurance company and that was that. I had to come in today. But this was my last day of the 2026 school year.

Letters are all cut freehand in a font I just created based on curved lines. I don’t know why H and A came out so much smaller than everyone else but it kind of works.

This is the first part of a quote he wrote about his first glimpse of the monsoon. The second part is on the the middle bulletin board. The monsoon is still a ways off this year, but they are calling for an El Niño year, which can only be good for us if it actually happens

Jesus Stands with the Marginalized

Leave a reply

This is a commission and it’s hand lettered so I guess I should put it here. There is some controversy at a local school district and those TPUSA d-bags will be there to scream about how their religion requires them to hurt marginalized people, so of course the Coyote, who is also a one of those radical priests who think Jesus wanted people to feed the hungry and welcome the immigrant and support the marginalized will be there too, wearing his collar and carrying this sign.

This Bonus Board

Leave a reply

Threw this one together in record time. Last night I thought I would get up early and go in and do this work and finish early and leave. But then I thought, “Hey, it’s August 1. I should look at the calendar to see what I’ve got going on this month.” And I realized I had a doctor’s appointment in the morning. And then I didn’t get to sleep until almost dawn and had to get up and run to this appointment and then have breakfast afterward, around the time most people are finishing lunch.

Blah blah blah, didn’t get in until 2:30, the air conditioning still isn’t fixed so it was 90° in there, and it was “Meet the Teacher” day so it was a total madhouse with hundreds of people wandering around.

Still managed to knock this out in under 4 hours. It’s not fancy but it does the job.

I knew last night I was going full rainbow on this one. I showed the background to the librarian before I did the letters and she loved it and I said, “I’m being very subversive” and then her daughter said, “You made a Pride flag,” and then I said, “Shh, we can’t say that,” and she said, “Why not?” and I said, “Because some people are humorless.”

“Humorless” in this case is a euphemism for “bigoted asshats.”

Anyway, the office manager loved it and it really makes huge impact on the space. And also, little queer kids will know.

Back to School 2025: the Hawaiian Shirt Trio

Leave a reply

If you can believe it, school starts Monday.

I can’t quite believe it but I decided to act like I did and get the breezeway ready. Originally I intended to come back today (Thursday) but then in Monday I decided I didn’t want to be rushed, and good thing, too. Because it turned out that not only would I be decorating all 3 bulletin boards in the breezeway again, they also wanted me to do the one by the principal’s office.

I didn’t have any huge inspiration but I decided I wanted to make a hibiscus and then it just made sense to go along with that theme. Which is hilarious because the breezeway is, of course, in the Sonoran Desert. But it’s frankly as humid as a tropical rain forest this week. So that’s cool.

I could have made MORE FLOWERS or made the flowers fancier or added smaller leaves or other design elements, but I had to go feed the Bear’s cat and then I had to give Miss Kitty a yoga lesson and ALSO I still have a whole day of work on that fourth board tomorrow. A dragon’s gotta pace dragonself.

The lettering is based on the De Latto font. The leaves are monsteras.

13 Ways of Looking at The Waters 12: The Girl Who Came to Land

Leave a reply

If you are among the chosen few who read my unpublished novel The Girl Who Followed Her Own Counsel you might see some parallels between this story and one of the Little Red Riding Hood variants in that novel. The point is: either you grow up or you die. There’s no option where you stay a kid forever no matter what your family does to keep you there. If you keep living, you’re always going to become an adult, and, sad as it is, your grandparents are always going to decline as you rise.

I had what one might call a prolonged childhood, by choice, in which I was able to keep a youthful outlook on everything until I was about 35. Adulthood never really suited me, though, and I’m happy to move on to my crone phase. I’m happy to be a witch. I was never cut out to be a grown up.

Perhaps not coincidentally, my grandmother lived to 96 and only passed away about a year ago, when I was 49. Now I’m grandmother-aged myself. You can’t stop the progression of time. You can’t stop your children from growing up.

13 Ways of Looking at The Waters 11: The Spirit of the Waters

Leave a reply

The Spirit of the Waters is probably my favorite thing I drew for this comic, which is why she’s going to be a full color feature of the Table of Contents and probably, at some point in the future after this comic is put to bed and after my literary journal release party and hopefully after getting out of jury duty, I hope to make it a sticker. There’s a few images in this comic that would make good stickers.

13 Ways of Looking at The Waters 10: How Six Knights Found Their Faith, page 1

Leave a reply

This is the story that’s probably going to do the least for a reader who hasn’t actually read the book, and required the most careful note taking on my part, so I could really get a sense of each of the six “knights” and what they specifically had to be sorry about.

Also, tiny mermaid boobs, tee hee. Always gotta have at least one naked body part in each of these comic books to ensure that I can’t show them to my elementary students.