The colors of butcher paper stocked by my school change occasionally, but this beautiful lavender has never come up before. I was so excited to see it, and I knew that I would have to make this tansy aster, a common wildflower in southern Arizona. So even though I didn’t start with a theme, a theme emerged. Sort of.
After finishing both flowers I thought it would be fun to give them both little interpretive signs like it was a botanical garden. I chose the name most commonly used here in Tucson, another common name, and the scientific name (this one is Machaeranthera tanacetifolia) and I used paint pens for the lettering to save time.
I’ll save back a few feet of lavender paper for the future. No doubt, when this roll is gone, it won’t come up again for a decade or so.
Creating 3 bulletin boards that all matched was starting to feel kind of burdensome, and it occurred to me that the bulletin boards don’t all have to go together, so instead of starting with a grand theme, I decided to start with one idea. This is the Mexican Bird of Paradise (Latin name Caesalpinia pulcherrima) aka the Peacock Flower (aka a lot of other things). It’s a ubiquitous ornamental here in southern Arizona, but it seems to be native to the Caribbean, and is specifically associated with the Barbados, but also with Suriname. I couldn’t find a definitive place of origin, but I didn’t look very hard either.
Anyway, they’re very showy and stunning, very complex blossoms. The flowers begin to bloom from the bottom of the pyramid of buds and as each layer shrivels a new layer opens.
This image already seems to resonate with its audience. There are 2 Mexican Bird of Paradise bushes in the courtyard where the bulletin boards hang, and most of the kids figured it out. The actual flowers are less than an inch wide; these paper simulacra are probably 20 times larger than life.
Yes, it’s that time of year again! The time of year when the monsoon winds blow so hard they tear my work off the wall before anyone even sees it 😭. This was the worst year yet. This photograph was actually taken before the whole board got ripped up by a weather system that apparently caused tornados in southeastern Arizona, a region of the world absolutely not know for the presence of tornadoes.
I spent 4 days on these 3 boards. I lost some time on the first time because they surprised me with MY OWN BOOKCASE in the library. Granted, I think the librarian was just tired of my stuff being stashed everywhere behind the circulation desk, but it was a very nice gift. After 21+ years, I actually have a space that isn’t “jammed under the circulation desk.” Anyway, I spent a while moving my stuff—all my book repair supplies, all my writing club materials, and all my art supplies—to this new space. It took a while.
The second bulletin board had already blown off (I’ll tell that story in the next post) and I had actually reinforced everything before I left Wednesday (the day before school started). Thursday, I was taking an early morning walk (really the only kind of walk you can realistically take in Tucson in the summer) when the librarian texted me a picture of my SHREDDED work.
i texted back that I was 1 minute away from the school and would be in to fix it before realizing that I was wearing a VERY GAY (like, literally advertising a queer event) off the shoulder shirt and no bra, and then quickly texted that it would actually be 20 minutes, because I had to go home and don some more appropriate attire.
I did manage to get it all buttoned up before the bell rang but it’s kind of sad looking, all stapled and taped and patched. Not an auspicious start to the best year ever.
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 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
So obviously I had to go beyond my normal sources to get this many different greens. Fortunately, I knew where to go and had many different options available. In the end I think it was something like 15 different kinds of paper: butcher paper, printer paper, construction paper, origami paper, tissue paper, and specialty paper.
The attribution to JRR Tolkien was actually yellow paper but I did the lettering in 2 green marker outlined with green pen and then colored the rest of the paper with a different green marker.
Even though I was just going for strips of green, a lot of people saw a forest in this design. One person even specifically suggested a birch forest.
All 3 of these bulletin boards took about 14 hours.
People keep asking me what it is and I’m like, “It’s very obviously a fish with a mustache wearing a top hat.” A fancy koi fish, to be precise. Like how is that not obvious? I feel like, while I may not be the greatest artist in the world, when I make a picture of a fish with a mustache wearing a top hat, it looks exactly like a fish with a mustache wearing a top hat.
It goes with the jackalope and the catterflies. I actually finished it last week but I was so tired I forgot to take a picture of it. He took so much extra time to make because I accidentally put his face on sideways and it was a lot of work to fix it and cover up the mistake.
The sakura blossoms, of course, symbolize the fleeting nature of life, youth, and beauty.
Originally I was going to make 7 of these “part real, part imaginary” banners because there are 7 columns but already there is a giant sun? sunflower? occupying one of them and I think it’s possible I might be asked to create a large Dewey Decimal System poster for another, plus it’s time to change out the bulletin boards and then comes the mad rush to lay out the literary journal and get that to the printer’s so it’s ready for the release party, immediately after which I’m going to Chicago to present my new comic book at the American Literary Association convention.
So, we’ll see. But this fish with a mustache and a top hat is a vision realized. Originally I thought he might also wear a monocle but that would just be silly, right?
This is probably the latest winter holiday bulletin board I ever did: Friday is the last day of school and I just got it up yesterday. I’m not thrilled with the fact that the flags are just suspended in space but I needed to be done. I spent a lot of hours on it but I never have enough time.
But this is a very Tucson kind of scene. I love that chiminea on the left and wish it were real and in my back yard.
I noticed the kinders all putting their hands up to the fires like they were trying to warm up. I must add that, even though it was cold when I had this idea, it was 82° when I finished and the kinders were pretending to warm their hands by the fire. That’s Tucson for you.
I’ll post more chimineas tomorrow. The third bulletin board just says “STAY WARM” in big letters. I probably won’t post it at all because it’s not that interesting.
This banner was many weeks in the making, not because I spent a lot of time working on it, but because i spent so much time working on other things. There’s a lot to do in a library. So I stayed late twice this week and, I confess, cannibalized the flowers from another project completed some years back. Sometimes I save pieces of old bulletin boards. That saved a lot of time.
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.
qwertyvsdvorak 