Tag Archives: mandala

Look but Don’t Touch Mandala

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Nature isn't interested in your idea of perfection and neither am I.

Nature isn’t interested in your idea of perfection and neither am I.

I get the sense that if you saw this plant in nature, your first instinct would be to reach out for it, upon which it would probably secrete some kind of digestive fluid on your skin and try to eat you. At the very least, it must be covered with a rash-producing oil. It’s fancy in order to lure you in.

It probably also eats bugs, and small frogs, from which it acquires the necessary chemical to produce its poison.

Obviously, it’s very late or I wouldn’t be sitting here making up stories about drawings of things that don’t exist. I think I had an article about comic book scholarship on Panels yesterday, but I don’t have the link as I’m writing this. Also, I received an ARC of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new book, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, which I’ve been asked to review for the Fondulac Library’s website, which is sort of strange considering I’ve never even been to Fondulac and don’t live anywhere near East Peoria. I do know a lot of people, many of whom are librarians and/or authors, though.

If you haven’t read Bonnie Jo Campbell, you should consider it. This book isn’t being released until October, I think, but her other work is most likely available in your public library.

Tropical Mandala

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Feel the salt breeze in your mind.

Feel the salt breeze in your mind.

This is, of course, a flowery-type mandala in soft shades of pink, blue, and green. It’s totally wild and not interested in your rigid ideals of symmetry. It probably smells narcotic. Insects hurl themselves into its fragrant depths.

I’m still working on my big project; clearly, it’s going to take a lot longer than I anticipated. Hopefully it ends up looking something like what’s in my head. Maybe one day in the future I’ll have the ability to focus on my work for more than a couple hours a day, because I have way more projects going on than I’m capable of paying attention to. It’s taken me 3 days to get to the place I probably would have gotten in 3 hours in the past.

Hopefully I can get in 2 more good hours today.

An Off-Kilter, Interlocking, Pointy Mandala

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Careful with this one; it's sharp.

Careful with this one; it’s sharp.

Tuesday was my best day ever for traffic on this blog; Yesterday’s comic got some traction on Reddit and over 400 people visited. My second-best day was also due to a boost from Reddit. I am not on Reddit, of course. Maybe I would be more popular if I was. It just seems like a massive time suck, and there are already enough of those in my life. Maybe if I could just upload comics to Reddit without reading any of the site, but my understanding is that you need karma before people take you seriously, and you can’t get karma unless you basically live there.

I posted it to Tickld but they are pretty fussy about comics there and the last time I posted a comic they just removed it, apparently because I didn’t sufficiently prove that it was my original work. Considering what percentage of that site is screen grabs from Tumblr, their editorial policy confuses me, as does the criteria for things getting on the hot page. It used to be a hilarious site; now I find that 90% of the stuff that gets upvoted is old, or boring, or stupid. Why the hell did I want to cross post there anyway? I’m being downvoted into oblivion even as I post this.

Marketing fail. Story of my life.

Today I never got around to drawing because I had house guests, and when I wasn’t hanging out with them, I was cooking food for a bunch of people, and finishing reading a PDF of The Book Thief so the Boy knew I meant business about him finishing his summer reading, and nagging the Boy to finish his summer reading. I cooked 11 eggs today. That is important. Also, I have an aggressive headache from reading that massive PDF on my laptop. My brain is angry with me.

Cookie Cookie Cookie Crumble Mandala

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It's a pentagram of deliciousness!

It’s a pentagram of deliciousness!

When I look at this mandala I see a plate of artfully arranged ginger snaps, and little pink frosted cookies, and some other cookies, as well as cookies broken up to make symmetrical non cookie shapes. Also, I see cream. Or possibly custard. It’s like a very upscale version of one of those mud cakes that are made out of chocolate pudding and crumbled Oreos with a few gummy worms sticking out. You serve it in a plastic bucket with a shovel. But this five sided display of decadence belongs on the dessert table of an autumn themed wedding banquet.

A Candy Colored Mandala

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Sweet and sour

Sweet and sour

This color palette reminds me of the sour gummies the kids like. Apparently I am too old to understand their appeal. Even though I would not eat the colors in this mandala, I I love its complexity, the combination of circles and triangles, the way the (almost) straight lines intersect. It’s a really successful design.

Today was a pretty emotionally taxing day for me. We thought we would blow off steam with some storm chasing, as towering cumulonimbi surrounded the city in the early afternoon, but they had all dispersed against the mountains, which happens sometimes, so we walked by the river instead, and then ate West African food and then got baklava, and then watched a cute anime called A Letter to Momo. Other than that I have no update.

On Thursdays We Get Mandalas

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This mandala is on point.

This mandala is on point.

Yesterday was Monsoon Day, otherwise known as the Dia de San Juan. It’s a local holiday, I guess. Maybe it rains on June 24 in other parts of Arizona, but in 11 years in Tucson, I’ve never known a real storm to come down before the 5th of July. Instead, it just gets really hot and muggy. I went out to lay down some pre-emergent on the front yard to prevent the desert weeds from taking over the property when the rains do come, and I was dripping with sweat when I came in. Still, we haven’t swapped the swamp cooler over for the AC, which means the humidity still isn’t high enough. It’s not yet monsoon.

It was another ineffective day for me; mostly just reading. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get my act together.

Just Another Digital Mandala

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Circles within circles...

Circles within circles…

Here’s your Friday mandala. My hand is a little stiff from filling in all those circles, or I probably would have filled in twice as many circles.

Also today I decorated the top of a disintegrating $10 Ikea table with $7 of patterned duct tape. It looks pretty good, all things considered. Will post a picture when the legs are done. It’s in the 110 degree range in Tucson, and there was also a chiltepin pepper plant to repot. I didn’t want to melt before that was taken care of. I actually wanted to draw a comic, but we had an impromptu pool party and I didn’t get to work until almost midnight.

 

A Pointy Mandala

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You don't want to step on this mandala in the middle of the night.

You don’t want to step on this mandala in the middle of the night.

It’s the iron throne of mandalas. You might look cool sitting on it, but you won’t feel good about it, ever. That’s a point that Martin makes in the books that doesn’t entirely come across in the TV show: the iron throne is extremely uncomfortable, and whoever sits on usually gets cut. Because it’s a chair made out of swords. The symbolism is spot on, but the functionality is lacking.

Actually, there’s one thing in the books that they never even mention in the show, which seems really important to me, and it bugs me that they don’t mention it, and this is the fact that Winterfell is built over a series of hot springs. This is why it’s such a strategically important location. They can just throw some greenhouses up over the springs and grow food through the long winter no matter how many years it lasts. Plus, whoever controls Winterfell can basically hole up there forever (provided the White Walkers don’t get in). Given the pace at which short-sighted power players in Westeros are destroying resources while tragedy creeps every closer, the value of the old Stark place is probably greater than something like the Red Keep, which would most likely be a delightful spot to die one the supply lines are cut, given that there doesn’t seem to be any agriculture in King’s Landing. Once the rats and pigeons run out and the Blackwater is overfished, everyone in the capital city will be forced to resort to cannibalism.

I can’t believe I just wrote an entire post on Game of Thrones, but there it is. The iron mandala should probably have 7 points, but whatever. My head hurts. The weather here is weird and I didn’t sleep much last night and I cant’ find any naproxen. The end.

Just Like Honey from the Bee Mandala

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Just like honey, from the bee

Candy drops and sweet emotion 

Monday was a good day! My article about Jews in comics got a good reception, and mercury got up over 102, which means a couple things: my fingers and toes and nose didn’t get frozen even when The Man blasted the cooler, zero traffic picking the kids up from the first day of camp (people flee this city when it gets hot), and the pool finally reached 80 degrees! Hooray. Now I have a compelling reason to get my butt off this couch. I will be conducting all further business from within the confines of my swimming pool.

People sometimes ask how to survive in the desert in the summer. This is how to survive in the desert in the summer. Also, we have an ice maker.

One thing I spend a lot of time doing in the pool is rescuing bees from drowning. I guess when we’re not in it it’s flat enough that they don’t break the surface tension, but the kids and I must have pulled 15 bees out of the water in 30 minutes. Well, I pulled most of them and the Boy got a couple. The Girl is still timid, even though she’s seen me do it a thousand times. Seriously, the last thing a drowning bee is thinking of is stinging you.

You can observe them very minutely when they’re all wet and out of sorts. They shake their wings vigorously, too fast for the human eye to see, and use their front legs to brush the water off their midsection. They even brush off their long tongues. If they’re still wet, they lean onto their front legs and use their back legs to dry themselves. The longer they’ve been in the water, the more time they take to combobulate themselves.

This mandala reminds me of butterscotch and toffee and caramel: all the mostly-sugar candies, and also, of course, honey.

Sticks and Thorns Mandala

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It’s a prickly situation

I had intended to post 2 comedic drawings of teddy bears tonight, but I was offered the opportunity of a free sitting with a sought-after photographer, one who usually charges a decent amount of money for people who don’t fit his perfect profile in terms of the models he wants to shoot, and nobody has ever mistaken me for a professional model, so in the interest of feeding my midlife crisis, I decided to do that instead of work, and now it’s after midnight and there’s no time or headspace to finish my weird teddy bears, so here, have a mandala.

This is a very desert-y one, all spiky with wild grasses and dry thorny twigs. It appears flammable. Some of the grasses are probably non-native invasives, whose presence tend to change the character of the desert, and make it more susceptible to uncontrollable wildfire. Usually, they’re pretty prevalent at this point in the season, but it’s been the wettest spring I can remember around here and there’s still plenty of green to choke out the brown.