Tag Archives: sun

Feeling Good

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Originally, I planned to create this bulletin board in January, as a tribute to the new year. I also planned for it to not be cold and cloudy all year. I also planned to make the letters very fancy and musical. As they say, life is what happens when you’re making other plans. We haven’t got much sun, but I did my best to summon it.

I didn’t put an attribution on this quote. I knew that neither Muse nor Michael Buble was the original author. For a while I thought it was Nina Simone, but it turns out that some people I never heard of wrote it in 1964, the year before Ms. Simone made her recording, and frankly their names (Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse) were long and I wanted to go home.

The whole thing is kind of slapdash but I’ve learned that if I try to make things perfect, I fail, but it I start out making things wabi-sabi, the finished product LOOKS perfect.

Feigned Glass Window II

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Whew! This second one took one about 5 or 6 hours, maybe half as long as the first one. Plus I didn’t have to wait for materials to be delivered. There should be enough of everything left to finish the third one in style (wish I had a *bit* more blue, but with care it should suffice).

This piece seemed to dictate itself. I had different ideas about how the color would play out, and for the geometric shapes as well, but then it sort of came together with way more yellow than I intended, with more complexity at the edges and less where I ended up using bigger pieces. But I think it looks great.

The person who commissioned it loves it so far, plus I got another commission today!

I can’t seem to figure out how to do captions on my phone; maybe I’ll edit it later. But the caption should read, “Google ‘lemniscate’ right now.”

Here Comes the Sun!

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IMG_7525

This blog is on fire. And it’s lit.

Even though teachers in Arizona are walking out on Thursday #RedforEd and don’t know when they’ll be back, it was time to change out the early spring bulletin board for the late spring bulletin board. The cool, blue aesthetic of the early spring bulletin board did not reflect the reality of the temporal environment, and also the letters were coming off. This design is more accurate for the next month. The fox there is something foreboding in the color scheme, like: WARNING! Arizona summers are brutal. But I like them.

This piece was pretty straight forward. I used a protractor, a ruler, and a folded piece of construction paper to get the shape of the red bottom layer perfect. Then I used that layer as a guide to get the middle orange and top yellow layers to match up, and cut the random little sparks that I added on top for more depth. For the lettering, I drew freehand and then cut all the layers at the same time. I doubled up the paper for the letter that repeated, meaning that the letter E involved cutting 12 sheets at the same time. One of the Hs is upside down and the centering is a bit off but otherwise the lettering is my favorite part. The image took 4 hours and the lettering took 3.

Tomorrow I’ll go back with the rubber cement and the stapler and make sure everything’s tacked down. Although this board will probably only be up a month before I do the summer one, it’s a little known fact that rubber cement becomes increasingly less adhesive the closer you get to 100°. And it’s getting close to 100° around here.

Dragon Comics 103

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Yellow and blue make green, red and yellow make orange...

Yellow and blue make green, red and yellow make orange…

We used to have a concept book about color when we were kids, one with transparent pages that stacked up to reveal different colored animals. There were a bunch of creatures, all in different colors; the ones you saw depended on which pages you looked at and also which direction you looked. That always fascinated me. So that’s a basic visual gag.

This comic is also about The Man’s remarkable ability to fall asleep at any time, anywhere. I have seen him fall asleep in the space of 45 seconds. I have seen him sleep with small children sitting on top of him. I have seen him sleep on the ground. I have seen him fall sleep even though he’s only been up a few hours and slept 8 hours the night before. His happy ability to nap inspires insane jealousy in me, the chronic insomniac.

Anyway, It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve drawn a comic but it was fun to get back.

The Breezeway Part 4

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Spring 2014, Here again I had the idea for the design first and then found an appropriate quote later

Spring 2014, Here again I had the idea for the design first and then found an appropriate quote later

It’s important to photograph these images as soon as they’re posted. The colors do fade very quickly, and every once in a while, the kids deface things. This one not only got sun-bleached in a week or two, but also got scribbled on by someone who clearly was too young to hold a magic marker. It’s still very beautiful to me. These letters were all cut out freehand.

Spring 2012, the teachers really seem to like the poetry boards

Spring 2012, the teachers really seem to like the poetry boards

More freehand letters, plus I cut every one of those leaves out by hand. Sort of wish I had planned the layout a little better, but it’s still fairly striking.

And here is my last bulletin board of the 2013-2014 school year. Anyone who lives in southern Arizona has seen the sky like this: during the monsoon, if it rains in the afternoon, sometimes it clearly slightly afterward. The clouds are all lined up like this, with sun tumbling through the breaks and spilling down over the mountains, which glow gold, red, and purple, depending on the time of day.

Summer 2014, the monsoon sky

Summer 2014, the monsoon sky

This sampling of a dozen images represents most of my favorite, and maybe about half of the designs I’ve done since 2009, when I first started. Looking back, it’s not an insubstantial body of work!