This is, of course, my Valentine’s Day bulletin board. The leaves are hearts, the fruits are hearts, the roots are hearts, and the trunk is hearts. I did the roots with a scalpel in one piece. All the hearts I cut freehand. I folded all the leaves and stapled them down the center line to create dimensionality.
It’s the purest form of love there is: the love between a baby dragon and its parent.
Happy Valentine’s Day, whether you hate people or not.
I am trying to love people.
This was a pretty simple piece. I used Sharpie for the black parts (excluding the eyes), which saves a lot of time. I sort of wanted to make the chest part rainbow, but I also sort of wanted to go home, and home won. From a technical perspective it’s not one of my most amazing boards, but from an aesthetic point of view (particularly the aesthetic point of view of an elementary school student) it’s a raging success.
As I adding the stapled details some third graders came to admire my work and asked me what the dragons’ names were. I told them to feel free to name the dragons themselves.
One girl said, “The baby’s name is Shadow.”
So her friend decided, “The big dragon is Midnight.”
Shadow and Midnight. Names that work equally well for black cats as red dragons, apparently.
Like I always say, you never really know what goes on inside other people’s relationships.
You know how I sometimes let my husband write my comic and then I just illustrate it? This comic was not my idea. It was not my idea. It was his idea. The Man’s. The Man thought of this. Not me. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, Happy Valentine’s Day. I guess we’re not exchanging gifts this year for financial reasons, so this comic is our gift to each other.
I wanted him to pose for the reference photo with me but he refused.
You have no idea what goes on in other people’s relationships.
This would have have been an insomnia comic if he hadn’t come up with this idea. I had a couple scripts in varying degrees of completion but none of them were going to get finished before I passed out from exhaustion. Good thing he’s sometimes timely. And funny. And I love him. Happy Valentine’s Day.
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.
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