I made the lindworm intentionally simple after drawing the 52 thousand scales on the dragon. She’s a little derpy but I love her.
This story took the longest to write, and is 1 of only 2 that I actually remember writing. All the others were generated in an intense flow state, basically a trance of pulling archetypes from the collective unconscious. But I had to think more deliberately to write the poems.
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.
Will I be doing any more hand lettering in the immediate future? Quoth the raven, “Not tonight.”
This is Halloween! This is Halloween! Halloween! Halloween! La la la!
Pretty often, the Halloween design is the bulletin board I’m most looking forward to. This one definitely was. I knew I wanted a raven, so I knew I had to do Edgar Allen Poe. The sticking point there was picking the right stanza; the poem is a lot longer than I remembered. I guess it could have worked with just “Quoth the raven ‘Nevermore’,” but where’s the fun in that? You don’t get very much poetry in 4 words.
Then again, cutting 170 paper leaves with terrible plastic scissors was nothing compared to the 4 straight hours I spent inking this bad boy. The raven himself was fairly simple. I sketched him out on Monday, cut and pasted him Tuesday (lost a lot of time because the Girl had hours of math homework to get to), fixed him up a bit more on Wednesday and blocked out the letters (in true Halloween horror fashion, I lost a lot of time on Wednesday because the school had a freaking hard lockdown because there was an active shooter across the street; The Man says it was an accidental discharge but tell that to 400 crying children who have just spend the last hour hiding quietly under their desks in a dark classroom), sketched out the lettering on Thursday (lost more time because the Girl had conferences at a different school in the suburbs and also some jerkface kid had pulled out 30 or 40 staples and tried to peel the raven off), and then strapped myself into my iPod and went at it with a handful of permanent markers on Friday.
It was 4 hours straight with no more than a few minutes break here and there to stretch. Made a lot of mistakes toward the end. It is what it is. I don’t have a name for that font; it’s just something that came up when I Googled “fun Victorian fonts for kids” and started clicking.
Sadly, the kids are on autumn break, which is a thing here. I always wanted an autumn break was I was a kid, and was always told to shut up about it, that I didn’t need a break because school just started. Kids today are lucky with their autumn breaks and their regular early dismissal days. But not so lucky with their active shooter hard lockdowns. Anyway, good thing their break had already started and the teachers just had grading day, because there’s no way I would have finished this if I also had to deal with children.
Anyway, you can read the complete poem here, and you should if you haven’t.
Seriously, my hand hurts. Happy Halloween.
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.
If you’ve got the curves, baby, I’ve got the angles
Gentle pastels, like the ’80s when the ’80s weren’t flashing eye-gouging florescence as they so often did.
This weekend I probably had too much fun. Party on Friday, party on Saturday, long nature hike with the Fox on Sunday. Obviously, I got nothing accomplished. My new T-shirt design remains in my head, as do numerous comic strips, graphic novel panels, short stories, and novels.
I wrote a sonnet in honor of a friend’s birthday. A sonnet is something I haven’t written in years, but that’s what the Fox does for special occasions and it seemed appropriate. Constrained forms are actually easier for me. Then, I thought, why not write it out with pen and ink? But it had been so long since I’d used the materials that it didn’t work out as planned. I ended up doing 3 drafts, none of which were especially pretty. The best version still ended up with fingerprints and smudges all over it, and the handwriting was nothing special. Also, there was ink all over the floor, and all over me. My friend loved the poem–I knew he’d rather have a personal present that I made–but after thanking me for it, he said he was going to frame it. So now everyone will see my lack of command over my materials.
Everything requires dedication.
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