Tag Archives: paper

1000 Origami Cranes

Yes, I counted them.

On December 8, 2015, I decided to implement 2 minor changes in my life. First, I began teaching myself to play the ukulele, and second, I began folding 1000 origami cranes. Now, just under 5 months later, my time investment has manifested into accomplishment. Not that I will ever be performing Led Zepplin’s greatest hits on the ukulele for an appreciative audience, but I can make songs come out of the thing, anyway. And here are my 1000 paper cranes.

If you’re unfamiliar with the legend of the 1000 paper cranes, it’s an old bit of Japanese folklore: whoever folds these cranes in less than a year and keeps them in their home will be granted a wish, or lifelong luck. Some say they stand for prosperity and health, or for prayers for peace. Things like that. It was a more obscure superstition until after World War II, when a little girl named Sadako Sasuki, dying from leukemia caused by her proximity to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a baby, started to fold them in the hospital while praying to beat the cancer. She didn’t make it, but her determination was communicated throughout the country until she became a symbol herself.

Traditionally, the cranes are threaded together on 25 strings in bunches of 40. I think I may put them into a less rigid accounting, but the main thing is to keep the rainbow pattern.

I never had a specific wish associated with these cranes. I’d like peace and prosperity and good health, surely. But really I was just trying to remind myself what it’s like to see a big project through to the end. For me, the end wasn’t about wishing, but about returning to the beginning. From the beginning, I knew that when I finished folding cranes, I would start writing a new book, a different book from the other books I’ve written, a book that would be unconstrained by the world’s notion about what’s OK. A horror novel, a ghost story, a tale of obsession, a metaphor for addiction. A book where extremely messed up things happen to wholly innocent people because the world is inherently unfair. A book without apology, that doesn’t care if it offends you, because frankly, the world doesn’t care if it offends me, so why pull punches? My 11th unpublished novel…

Selling is boring. Selling is the worst. Creating things is exciting, and it is the best.

To that end, I’ll probably be changing the format of the blog in the near future, but it’s uncertain what that would look like right now. It doesn’t seem possible to just stop drawing comics, but it been proven repeatedly that 4 comics a week isn’t feasible. There are other things to do.

Making Mistakes: A New Year’s Bulletin Board

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It’s not perfect, but I learn as I go.

For the first bulletin board of 2016, I knew there would be flowers. The quote came afterward. Monday, I went in just to get the background up, and it took all of Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon to finish the project.

Originally I planned to make an assortment of very different 3-dimensional flowers, but I started with the big one, and it ended up taking me almost 3 hours and it didn’t even look exactly how I wanted it (it would be better with twice as many petals) so I ended up experimenting with another method of getting a (smaller) flower with many petals and some dimensionality, and then, at the very end, I threw on a bunch of simpler (but still complicated) really small ones in the same color scheme.

You can really see the dimensionality.

For the quote I was thinking of Anaïs Nin: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” But then it seemed like Nin could possibly be a little racy for an elementary school if some impressionable young person decided to look her up. Or if some grownup decided she was inappropriate. It’s really an outside possibility but people can be pretty touchy about literature, and she’s strongly associated with erotica, so I decided to err on the side of caution and go with Gaiman. We have 2 of his books in the library: Coraline and The Graveyard Book. I edited the quote just a bit for length. It’s still so long that there was no time to cut out the letters.

You can tell where my hand got tired at the end.

Black Cat Bulletin Board

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A cat is watching

Happy October! My funny little black cat, who has been the subject of at least two other blog posts, gets her chance to shine in the spotlight, or rather, glower in the shadows. I knew I wanted to do a black cat bulletin board this year, and I was trying to figure out how that would look on a black background. At the same time, after searching for relevant text, I found this Rainer Maria Rilke poem:

“Black Cat” by Rainer Maria Rilke

Ah, “invisible.” That was the key. I went in yesterday and blocked out the poem, then inked it with a silver metallic Sharpie, which died halfway though, so I had to run out to the nearest Walgreen’s and buy their last silver Sharpie, but even so, the text didn’t take that long. Maybe an hour. I went back in today to put it together. I had some big ideas about making the eyes sparkle with the gold and bronze Sharpies, but it didn’t look as great as I thought it would, and the bronze Sharpie was dying, even though it was new in the package. Anyway, yellow is more striking.

My kitty is fierce.

I used black construction paper for the ears, nose and mouth (the background is black butcher paper, so it’s a subtle difference) and the whiskers are the silver Sharpie again. Very minimalist, which took a lot less time than usual, but I did spend quite a while on the eyes.

How to Fly Higher Than an Eagle

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You are the wings beneath my wings.

This Isaac Newton quote probably refers most particularly to the work of 2 great scientists who came before him: Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. Although Newton is still regarded as one of the greatest scientists to ever live, having made major contributions to the fields of mathematics, optics, celestial mechanics, and of course, the study of gravity, over 300 years ago, he had to acknowledge that his leaps would not have been possible had he not studied the foundational works of those who came before.

In other words, read a book.

A crow riding an eagle

As for the image, there are fairy tales that involve smaller birds flying higher and farther than stronger birds by riding on their backs, and there are several sets of photographs of this phenomenon which you can Google at your leisure. It’s a documented fact that little birds sometimes hitch a ride on bigger birds.

Close up on the wing. Somehow, my freehand drawing shortened the back wing considerably, which I didn’t notice until after I cut it out, andI ended up having to add 2 pieces to make it big enough, but that was OK, since eagles have those layers of feathers anyway. it looks better this way.

The kerning on this one is off, because I only had a really limited time to work (I actually wanted to put in clouds, but as it was it took 30 minutes longer than I wanted) and didn’t measure properly. The letters were cut pretty haphazardly, no guidelines, no rulers. I just counted the occurrence of the individual letters and cut them of folded paper, so I only had to do each shape once.

In addition, I spilled a 1/4 bottle of rubber cement all over my shirt/the cement without noticing. That’s a first for me.

Back to School Bulletin Board: (Another) Turtle!

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Yep, summer vacation is over.

I know I just did a turtle, but this is a different turtle. The green sea turtle is, of course, a saltwater creature, whereas this turtle is a freshwater type. Originally, it was supposed to be a red eared slider, a turtle that is a popular pet and, as a result, one of the most invasive species on the planet, but they are native to this region and not considered a nuisance here. However, I didn’t bring a reference photo of a slider, so what we have here is a sort of generic painted turtle. Painted turtles also live in this region. The concept of this bulletin board is from a nearby park called Agua Caliente, where, until recently, natural springs kept everything very lush. I believe the springs have recently dried up, and I haven’t been back in a while, but I’m sure you can still see palm trees, aquatic turtles, and fish there, even if some of the lagoons are drained.

A fresh canvas!

Last summer’s design had help up pretty well; it’s always a particular shame to take the old one down when it still looks good, but they can’t really be repurposed, due to the fact that they’re completely full of open staples and therefore sort of dangerous to touch. Plus, there’s no way to rehang them unless you go and bend all the staple closed, and I use hundreds of staples in a typical bulletin board.

I get my paper from the source!

I think yellow is a cheerful, but unusual background color. I probably would have gone for blue, to better represent water, but they hadn’t ordered any more butcher paper and no blue was to be had.

Incidentally, I don’t think I’ve ever shared a photo of this giant rack of paper, from which I get most of my colors. (Some of them–the construction paper colors–also come from the supply closet in the office, but the butcher paper is just kept out in the hallway on this rolling rack. It’s never in precisely the same spot, but it’s easy to find. It took me a while before I could effectively use the (blunt) cutting edge against which you have the pull the paper to effectively create a straight rip. It’s very joyful. Sometimes the kids can get paper, if their teachers tell them to, but for me I still feel a little frisson of power knowing that I can have any color paper I want. Bwoo ha ha ha.

Any color except blue, apparently.

Measure a lot of times, paste once.

I drew the shell first, then traced its edge to get the letters to fit on its back. Then I traced the edge again to get the letters to fit on top.

Very, very welcome.

From there, I glue everything to the board. It’s sort of a rote operation. I add a few staples for insurance, and then I go back over the design and add a bunch of staples for accent (and security). Here you can see how the staples add texture and dimensionality to the turtle’s head.

That is a face only another turtle could love.

When the turtle and the text were finished, there was still a lot of blank space and the whole thing looked kind of threadbare. First I added some palm trees, then some fish and some river rocks, and then a few more fish. I go back and glue anything that isn’t lying flat again.

I did this!

Truthfully, I meant to start this yesterday, but instead I spent the entire day obsessing about how filthy my office was and totally forgot what I had planned to do. Needless to say, I have not yet started cleaning my office. However, I have created and uploaded some new art, so my conditions from yesterday were still fulfilled. This isn’t my favorite design–it feels like it needs a lot more background–but I only had one day to do it if there was going to be a new bulletin board when the kids came back and it’s 104 degrees out (this bulletin board is outside) and there’s a fire on the mountain, so I feel like the 5 hours I put in today was all I had for this project. It’s cute and it looks OK. So, success.

Flying Sea Turtle Honeymoon Express Leaves Vancouver on Schedule

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Everybody climb aboard the Flying Sea Turtle Honeymoon Express!

At last I can reveal what I’ve been doing with every free second in which I had the ability to focus during the last 10 days! It’s a mosaic collage for my sister and brother-in-law! The had a civil ceremony on Tuesday, and their big wedding is going to be tomorrow. I haven’t given them this gift yet, but I can’t imagine my sister will be spending a lot of time on the Internet the day before she gets married.

I had a bunch of other ideas for their gift, but everything fell through and making something cool was the only reasonable option. I chose a sea turtle because I know they like turtles, and a Vancouver-inspired backdrop because that’s where they live.

You can’t really see my pencil marks but I assure you I wasn’t making this up as I went along.

I started out by purchasing a bunch of origami paper and this 11×14 board. I sketch out the islands in pencil, tore up the blue paper, sketched out the turtle on notebook paper (you can see a bit of it in the upper right hand corner) and generally chose colors for things.

Scenery coming together.

Using matte medium, I began to mount the squares onto the board to form a background representing mountainous islands and their reflection in the water. I used a bunch of metallic and foil papers, which don’t photograph that well, because their colors change depending on the light. I would sort of like to make a shirt out of this design, but I’m not certain how well it will translate.

The turtle isn’t mounted yet, but I needed to keep checking that it fit.

Then I began the turtle. Using my original sketch, I cut out a silhouette, and then I created stencils for the individual pieces of the turtle by slowing dismantling the sketch. You can see the diminished remains of the sketch to the right. The metallic background paper is orange, with green streaks if you turn it in the light.

I’m a delightful creature!

Here, the turtle is complete. Just the details on each flipper took about 20 minutes. The turtle itself probably took 4 or 5 hours. It wasn’t as easy to do such fine work as it used to be; my body doesn’t want to sit for that long at a stretch, and my eyes don’t want to focus on tiny details, and my hands tire easily, especially cutting small pieces like the skin texture. Now the sketch is in 50 pieces scattered all over the office.

Somehow I neglected to photograph the process for the man and woman riding the turtle, but if you scroll back up you can see them, although I wonder if their colors ought to be brighter and more contrasting. Well, like everything, I learned a lot. If I did it again, it would be different and possibly better, but there’s no way I could do this again. Maybe another animal.

So, all in all, the completed project probably took close to 20 hours. I lose track of time when I’m working. Sometimes I have to keep Netflix playing, even though I’m not watching, just so I have a way to mark the passage of time and remind me how many hours I’ve been sitting there.

Congratulate my sister on her nuptials if you know her!

Summertime and the Cuttin’ is Easy Bulletin Board

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Summer sunset bulletin board

It’s the last week of school for Arizona kids, at least the ones attending TUSD and Amphi, and I put together this dazzling summer sunset bulletin board to send them off (and for the summer staff and camp kids to enjoy). Up until about 90 seconds before I started making it, I had no idea what I was going to do.

This one took 2 days; the first day I just put up the background. There was nobody else around and I had a couple hours, so I thought I’d attempt a rainbow sunset. If I were to do this again, I think I might try to cut all the layers of paper at the same time. It felt a bit lopsided to me. For whatever reason, the school doesn’t stock purple butcher paper, so I had to tape a few pieces of construction paper together to do that layer, and it was harder to work with.

Day 1: just the sky, mountains, and sun

The next day I sketched out the cactus and the birds on black paper and cut it all out as a single piece, mostly using scissors, but getting the scalpel in there for some of the fiddly bits. I used my wedding invitations as a reference. A designer put the image together for me from a few pictures; this was before I knew Photoshop, or I probably would have done it myself and been even more impressed with the result, but we were pretty happy to get invitations that more or less looked the way we wanted.

Detail from our wedding invitations.

The next day I sketched out the cactus and the birds on black paper and cut it all out as a single piece, mostly using scissors, but getting the scalpel in there for some of the fiddly bits.

I used my wedding invitations as a reference. A designer put the image together for me from a few pictures; this was before I knew Photoshop, or I probably would have done it myself and been even more impressed with the result, but we were pretty happy to get invitations that more or less looked the way we wanted.

Anyway, the silhouette was simple to draw; the hardest part was actually making out the pencil marks on black paper so I could accurately see what I was cutting. It all came out nicely and actually took a lot less time than many of the less complex bulletin boards take, about 4 hours max, although part of that is because there isn’t any text on this one. As per usual when the bulletin board is cactus themed, I used a lot of staples for spines, and also to keep the thing in place. It needs to be extra durable to last through the monsoon.

The silhouette.

Last I did the stars, which would have been a lot easier had the principal not kicked me out of the library so she could hold an interview there, because it was super windy in the breezeway and I spend half my time chasing bits of paper around, but in the end it seems to have worked out pretty well.

A Hot Spring Bulletin Board

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Volcano bulletin board

This dazzling gemstone celebrates the coming of spring and the heating up of the world. The idea of the volcano had been stuck in my mind for a while so I just went with it even though I didn’t have any idea of what that had to do with education or reading or springtime or really anything else. Of course, it’s the same volcano from Dragon Comics 65, which in turn is based on a pretty common photograph, but I can’t find the attribution.

Closeup on the smoke

Once the volcano was up, there was a lot of extra space, so I made the crazy sun and the smoke. Time consuming but fun.

This piece took 3 days; the first day I did the background, the second day the volcano, and the third day was the sun, smoke, and text. I picked the quote the second day after making the volcano; really had no idea what words I would use until pretty late in the evening. The text is from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Closeup on the crazy sun

Bulletin Boards for Continuity’s Sake

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For the sake of getting all of them in one place, I’ve decided to upload some of my early bulletin boards. A few decent layouts that happened to be more text than image, didn’t get added in the backstory part of this blog. However, it’s nice to have them all under one category, in case people want to review. I don’t have exact dates for the old ones, but maybe I will work that out someday.

Giving Thanks

This is my first or second Thanksgiving design. The quote is “Mankind owes to the child the best it has to give,” from the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child. I love the font as well as the message. Since there are people who seriously don’t believe anyone has a right to any of those things, it’s nice to know that there are organizations asserting that yes, kids should have healthcare and education (and food and peace and love and shelter and play and freedom). I would also add “water” to this sentiment, but I guess it’s sort of implied in food.

Who Do We Love?

It’s too bad that this image is not high enough resolution to make out all the text. I remember that white heart on the left talks about the Roman celebration of Lupercalia on the one on its right is about the real Saint Valentine. The slightly smaller heart on the far right just lets people know that I will add a heart for them if they think of more categories of things to love. This is either my first or second Valentine’s themed bulletin boards.

I don’t do particular holiday anymore so much as I do feelings and emotions. Typically, For Thanksgiving and the winter holidays I’ll have a theme about light and family, for example. Usually there will be something with a heart in mid or late winter but it won’t necessarily be about the holiday.

This Wednesday would be the day that I would switch from the New Year’s design to something for springtime (although thematically, these tend to offer similar ideas, and yes, I’m aware that that east coast and midwest are still snowed in; here in Arizona it’s the time of wildflowers and new leaves) but I got called up for jury duty that day. I’m still hoping I won’t have to go. Jury duty is ridiculously anxiety producing for me, and I’ve never even gotten past the first room where they make you watch a film about democracy. I totally believe in the potential of democracy and a trial by a jury of your peers, but I find getting up early to be physically debilitating, and I find being forced to sit on a hard plastic chair in a room full of strangers for an unspecified period of time incredibly stressful, and I also find being in the courthouse in general psychologically unpleasant (like, poking old PTSD unpleasant). If you could fulfill your jury duty online, watching the trial on your own schedule (within reason, of course), I’d be way more into it.

‘Tis the Season

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Although Christmas decorations that come out before Thanksgiving enrage me, when it comes to holiday bulletin boards, I do have to start early. I always do Halloween/All Souls, which leaves me with 6 weeks before winter break, so I can either scramble to do something sort of late autumny followed immediately by something early wintery (why is “wintery” a word, but “autumny” is not?) or I can stay on the one-every-6-weeks or so schedule and encapsulate the entire holiday season into one comprehensive thought.

Here’s my thought for the holiday season 2014:

Don’t worry; be happy

Originally, and for many weeks, I had intended this bulletin board to somehow feature hands. First I was thinking of a photo of people with different skin tones making a sort of hand mandala, but I don’t have access to that kind of paper anyway, so I considered another idea. Before I did any of the above paper cutting, I first cut a piece of brown paper into the shape of two hands forming a heart, like so:

Like this, except, you know, more cordate.

Then I cut the big red heart to fit inside the finger heart and made some rough cuts for the flames, at which point I laid everything out on the tab and realized that the hands were going to obscure the fire. By then I had already settled on the quote (I just Googled “joy quotes,” because that’s what I always end up with for the holidays anyway) and I figured the flames were going to look cooler than the hands, but I thought I could reposition the flames to make it work. At that point, I rolled everything up into a couple tubes and took them home, intending to cut all the letters at night. Instead, I drew Dragon Comics, so that when I went back to school Wednesday I was no further along than I had been on Monday.

For about 30 minutes, I fine-tuned the flames so they were not all identical, and pasted the colors together. I lightly affixed the heart to the bulletin board and arranged the flames underneath it, stapling and gluing in various ways I have learned best keep paper stuck to cork in a windy courtyard. I went to add the hands, saw there was no way to make them work, and that they didn’t look that great anyway, and discarded them. Instead, I hastily cut and paste the lettering, which is all very freehand with only the scarcest guidelines or regard for size.

I think the font offers a sense of joyful abandon.

Total time: about 6 hours (although I do spend a lot of time kibitzing with the librarian while I work).

Joseph Campbell was a great thinker, and I would hope the entire world could become familiar with some aspects of his work. He certainly did a great deal of research into the human condition, and with it, what makes people happy, and what makes them miserable. Understanding culture, and using it to maintain our humanity, is a more favorable choice than not understanding culture, and being crushed or dehumanized by it. He’s probably a pretty good example of a self-actualized human being, and a man who was able to find his life’s work in doing something he loved, and apply his life’s work to making the world a better place. I think that makes him a hero, even if his hero’s journey might not have been quite what he would have described as classically heroic.

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Tag Archives: paper

1000 Origami Cranes

Making Mistakes: A New Year’s Bulletin Board

Black Cat Bulletin Board

How to Fly Higher Than an Eagle

Back to School Bulletin Board: (Another) Turtle!

Flying Sea Turtle Honeymoon Express Leaves Vancouver on Schedule

Summertime and the Cuttin’ is Easy Bulletin Board

A Hot Spring Bulletin Board

Bulletin Boards for Continuity’s Sake

‘Tis the Season