Awesome Joolie

Each time it's offered, my friend Dan and I enter the Austin Art Boards competition, which is run by Reagan Outdoor Advertising and promotes local artists by putting their work up on billboards.

Each year, we don't win. I got two honorable mentions in years past, and Dan got honorable mention last time as well--go us!--but this year: bupkis.

My first entry. It got honorable mention.

The next year I tried again with a similar design. I tried to make it a little fancier by doing a three-color block print. Another honorable mention.

This year I didn't hear about it until a couple weeks before the deadline. I felt like the superhappy motif had maybe run its course, so I pasted a block print I'd done of a friend's cat onto a photo of the Texas sky as seen from one of our fine, sweeping overpasses.

The idea was that in the right conditions the billboard would blend into the background and it would just look like a giant cat head floating in the sky. I don't know, maybe that didn't really come across. It's also possible it just isn't that great of an image.

I still like it, though. I'm going hang the matted entry in my office at work and use it to help me think about what I should enter next year. So help me, I'm going to keep submitting these until they discontinue the contest, I win, or I die.