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 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.
This is a just a little thing I threw together to cover the extra bulletin board last week. I’ll probably replace it with a Halloween-themed one pretty soon.
It’s that time once again!
You might be thinking it’s too soon! It can’t possibly be that time. But here in Tucson, school starts in August. To be completely accurate, it begins tomorrow, August 1.
I didn’t have any inspiration when I walked in the building, but I noticed that someone had chucked a perfectly good bit of fancy paper in the recycling bin. I am forever pulling things out of recycling, sometimes because they are not recyclable, and sometimes because they are reusable by me.
So I got started with the background and the lettering and this pretty foiled paper was just winking at me. Water…ducks…rain…pun. Voila! Plus we’re still inside the monsoon.
Took about 5½ hours total but I stopped for a lot of conversation. Also the air conditioning has been broken since last May and it was 84° in there, which slows you down. I had a lot of conversations about that.
Well I messed up the line spacing but otherwise this is fun and different.
Letters are hand cut based on the Holiday font. I think I might have actually used this one before. Simple shapes, easy to work with. The big spark is also hand cut, and the rest are drawn with metallic markers.
Always trying to find some light in the darkness.
For my spring bulletin board I was inspired by images of lush cherry blossoms. After deciding that I wanted to recreate one branch, I knew that I needed a Japanese haiku to accompany it, and turned immediately to the words of Basho, whose poetry you probably read in school. I considered some other cherry-blossom haikus but ultimately thought this one the most accessible to schoolchildren, although it’s really about the fact that Basho is, at the time he wrote it, an older man recalling his childhood.
I cut the flowers from 4 different types of paper I found around the school. They often change suppliers so I’m never quite sure what I’ll have, but this offered a nice effect. I cut them all from a single stencil, and created the anthers from 5 staples for each flower. I estimate that I used 1500 staples here, so maybe 300 flowers?
First, though, I cut the lettering. I wanted to make it look like it was done with ink and brush, so after cutting the basic shapes, I went back and snipped at the edges and I have to say the effect is perfect. I’m so thrilled with this one and would like to keep it, but I don’t know how to deal with the 1500 stapes, and half the flowers are construction paper, which tends to fade in the sun anyway. Japanese people use the time of the Cherry Festival to reflect not only on the beauty of the cherry blossoms, but also upon their fleeting, delicate, and ephemeral nature.
Last year I was out in the desert with the Fox and he suggested we take a bushwhacking off-trail detour to look at a hilarious piece of graffiti someone left. “Welcome to Chupacabra Country,” it said on the back of same random abandoned building. This is indeed the land of the fearsome goatsucker. And the inscription stuck with me so long that I went out and got some polymer clay and made this plaque for the Fox to enjoy.
This is my first time using polymer clay in this way. I made a lot of mistakes. I learned a lot.
The color is Unicorn Spit, which I had also never used before. Lots to learn.
I made the letters by pressing an old set of refrigerator magnets into the clay. The little dots in each letter were actually formed by the magnet.
Probably will make another plaque like this for myself, but I think I’ll flip the coloring so the background is read and the lettering is yellow.
Back to the basics here.
How can it be summer already? But it is. School here ends May 23rd, and I’m off to present my thoughts about Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics in Michigan, so I decided to clear this off my plate in a simple but elegant fashion before I left. I’ll do something fancier in the fall. I’m trying to dream big, like I did as a kid, and I hope the kids at this school are too.
The top font is called Indie. The bottom I just drew freehand.
Seems like an appropriate message for today’s youth.
I chose “Youth” by Langston Hughes as the theme for this bulletin board, as it seems like a timeless poem, about feelings that keep coming around, and also because it feels hopeful. It suggests a sense of agency on the part of the reader, with the poet clearing the way. You have power! Into the future you go! Good stuff.
I wanted to change the board for September but I didn’t want to go too crazy time-wise, because soon it will be October and this year’s Halloween design is going to slay. Cutting all the letters took about 2 hours, and glueing them another 3 and the feet took about 3 more. So really I didn’t save any time.
No more pencils, no more lame excuses for overdue books, no more kinder hugs
As usual, I left my final message of the year to the last possible second. Did this one Wednesday day and Thursday of last week (just uploading now because I was on a writing retreat) in about 6 hours. School ended for the year at 2:45 Thursday and I hung this thing up around 4 p.m. Miss Kitty showed up (with an art commission) and helped me get it up a bit faster. I knew I wanted something sort of cooling, so I went for a nighttime theme. The cactus depicted here is the night blooming cereus, also known as Queen of the Night. The flowers bloom one night a year (the blooms are sort of clustered, so you might have a cactus in bloom for a couple days, but each flower lasts only one night). They’re pretty stunning.
The lettering is an ersatz version of a brushstroke font called Wanderlust, which I have inelegantly reproduced here in metallic Sharpies. I hope it keeps the people who have to be there over the summer feeling cool, and I hope all their summer dreams are realized.
I have so many comic scripts written. With a little focus, I hope to get back to actually drawing and posting them again.
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