I kind of phoned this one in because I had very limited time and was kind of distracted and there were 3 bulletin boards to cover before the end of the year. But the breezeway looks nice for the Cub Club kids and summer staff and any prospective families who come tour the school.
Closer views:
And then there was this smaller bulletin board on the other side of the library door:
Somehow I managed to carve out a couple hours to finish this thing before December swallows the clock whole! I start teaching again tomorrow, so that’s going to eat up my Tuesdays until May. I needed to get this thing done.
i feel like I slightly phoned it in. Mismeasured the last line so that’s annoying but what can you do? I mismeasured where I placed the tyger on the first board and had to truncate his tail. O well.
This is basically a joke for myself and the very few other people who are familiar with this poem AND my work. Because the poem is religiously themed. The whole book is about God, a mystic experience of God, but a Christian God, which I don’t believe in. Obviously, I don’t think my hand or eye are immortal, but the evidence is right here—it’s *my* hand and eye that framed this paper tyger’s fearful symmetry.
So that’s what I created. A meta-tyger to illustrate my mortal and two-dimensional fabrication of a tyger.
I doubt anyone at the school will get it or notice.
I had to go back after I finished and change the scissors. The scissors I was using at the time had black handles, so I made the paper scissors black as well, rendering them invisible against the black background. I hastily patched red handles on top when I realized my mortal mistake, so the second pair isn’t quite as perfectly aligned with the hands and blades as the first, but I think this scans.
This is, of course, an excerpt from William Blake’s “The Tyger” from his book Songs of Experience. This is a famous poem you likely read in English class a million years ago, which explores religious themes about creation. In the book, the poem appears in Blake’s handwriting, accompanied by a watercolor illustration of a tiger, which suggests that William Blake never saw a tiger in his life and had no idea what one might look like (Blake’s tiger looks like a taxidermied sloth-bear-dog) but he didn’t have the benefit of being able to access the sum total of human knowledge from a tiny box from which he could lifelike images of his subject while lounging around the studio in his pajamas.
Not being the religious type, I have a fun idea for the next panel, which I hope to finish next week.
My tiger is also hilariously inaccurate, but in my lifetime I have seen many tigers, real and in images and videos, and I think mine, as comical and cartoonish as I made it, is more recognizably tigerish.
As usual I see a million mistakes I made. But it’s cute. I just don’t have the time or energy to focus minutely on this project lately. I am making a lot of art, and my hand only has so many hours of functionality.
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.
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.
I’m very satisfied with this project, which took about 90 minutes. (It’s not quite done; the feathers aren’t attached to the hat yet.)
The Coyote and I are going to a goth masquerade ball and I have a very cool outfit put together but it seemed like I should add a top hat to match him and to enby it up. So he ordered me one, but it turned out to be a large, when my head is extra small. And it took forever to come and when it got here I was not impressed with the little feather that came with it.
Obviously it needed a big silver feather! Obviously there were some good ones on Etsy but none that could be delivered before the ball, which was annoying until it hit me that I could easily make paper feathers with materials already in my workshop. Just 3 kinds of sparkly metallic specialty paper and matte medium.
To be extra fancy I sharpened the scissors on a whetstone before beginning.
So here it is. And I will be the most magical dragon at the ball. Although I still have to figure out how to attach my mask to my glasses. Because I went to this masquerade last year in a different mask and I couldn’t see a thing all night. The new one is lace and can probably be tied on.
i overscheduled myself and budgeted my time poorly and burnt out and forgot my inspiration…so I ended up knocking out this little axolotl and then never going back to give them an environment or an interesting quote. It’s just an axolotl. The kids love axolotls.
I recently visited my mother-in-law in her new home and I noticed she had a bunch of elephant pictures on the wall and I was like, “I didn’t know you liked elephants.” (I mean seriously, I have known her for 15+ years; I had no idea she loved elephants. I feel unobservant.)
Like all humans from the great state of Kansas, she also likes sunflowers. I’m pretty sure they don’t even let you rent an apartment in Kansas if you don’t like sunflowers.
Anyway, I had to send her an elephant. The background is watercolor. The elephant is specialty paper. I made the sunflower by cutting petal shapes out of a picture of some other yellow flowers in a magazine.
There is a long and glorious history of mobile libraries powered by sure-footed donkeys, delivering books to people in remote or undeveloped areas where readers have no other access to texts, so when the librarian asked me to decorate the cart she intended to use to bring books to classrooms on days when the library is inaccessible to students, I knew I wanted to make this donkey-drawn bookmobile to pay homage to the most literate members of the asinine species.
Total run time was probably just over 2 hours. The school counselor helped me laminate it so it should last for a while.
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