Awesome Joolie

My beloved ocotillo died in the stupid freeze last winter, so this year I had to put our little strings of solar-powered Christmas lights on a Texas sotol instead. That bloom stalk came up a year ago and is now completely spent, so when it comes time to take the lights down we can probably chop it down and pull the lights off that way.

I think the sotol will be happier when the stalk is gone, too. They don't die after they bloom like century plants, but it has been looking noticeably grumpy lately. (I don't think I'm projecting here.)

Here's the ocotillo in better days. I knew that planting one in Austin was a risk, since they're from a warmer, drier climate than ours, but I had to try. Eric and I took our honeymoon in West Texas and they were blooming like crazy that spring. On the last day of our trip I opened the back door to our hotel room and gasped because the back fence was made of ocotillo stalks--they were all blooming and it looked a little like the fence was on fire, and I was like, god damn! So cool. When I got home my friend Katherine and I built a drainage mound to compensate for the heavier rainfall here in Central Texas and plunked one in, and all was well for years until a week of ice and snow and single-digit temperatures did it in.

It never did bloom for me, though; I think it has to go through some serious drought cycles or something to produce flowers. Still, it was a very striking plant. Someday I might plant another one, or I might go all in on the native-and-adapted thing for the front yard instead of hosting a plant that doesn't really want to live here.  

All that is a very roundabout way of saying we put up some Christmas lights this afternoon. I also finished the mermaid mosaic this morning--the demo a couple weeks ago was fun and went well, though it was lightly attended--and I'm happy with how it turned out. I have a Christmas commission to do for a friend and then I want to start experimenting, getting a little weird. I'm not even sure what that means yet, exactly, but I think I'm technically adept enough now to start playing around.

Last time I did a mosaic demo it was a Christmas market event at an art gallery in Georgetown, Texas, in 2019, and I brought a piece featuring a manatee that I had just started working on. I picked away at it for a couple of hours, politely answering questions from the occasional bored adult who wandered through--until an entire Girl Scout troop stopped by. They were probably nine or ten; that cool, interesting late elementary school age. Their troop's float had won first place in the town Christmas parade that morning, so they were super effusive and high on their success.

They unselfconsciously hijacked my project, gluing in tiles any which way and advising me that I should really incorporate a tsunami into the design. It was an absolute blast. (Though I admit I did scrape most of their work off the board after I was sure they were gone.) 

I'll probably never quite recreate the magic from that encounter, but I'm keeping the fun of that afternoon in mind as I prepare my piece for Saturday. The idea is I'll have a primary image already in place, and anyone who stops by will be welcome to add something to the background. I'm in an interesting spot, design-wise, as I'd like to have something elaborate and pretty enough to give people an idea of the possibilities of the art form, but also something simple enough that no one will feel weird about letting their six-year-old glue a bunch of shit to. I think I can straddle that. 

I saw a dead red-shouldered hawk in the grass on my walk to the library to return a book this morning. Then, at the library, people were setting up a press conference for a guy who was announcing his run for city council. I'm not in that district, though, so I didn't stick around to hear what he had to say.

I didn't see much of interest on the walk back. 

I spent the rest of the day working from home, moving plants around the backyard, and doing a grout study for the demo I'm doing on Saturday. 

Before

The idea is to lay out your tiles in multiple, identical configurations and then use different grout colors to compare the different effects.

During

In this case, light gray, medium gray, and dark gray.

After

It always blows my mind what a difference grout color makes. A very pale piece with all white tiles might call for a lighter grout, and a medium grout color can help pull together contrasting colors without washing one of them out. But in a case like this, I almost always prefer the dark grout. I love how vibrant it makes the tile colors in comparison. Although the medium gray splits the difference nicely. It's really a matter of preference. 

It rained all day today, a fairly unusual occurrence here. We're having the exterior of the house painted this week and the painters taped translucent sheets of plastic over all the windows to keep them clean, and I worked from home all day, so I felt like I was underwater as long as it was still light out. 

I printed some of my latest design this afternoon. This was the first linocut I'd done in months; the ink was rolling out like velvet and sitting on top of the paper exactly right today, and the only challenge was placing the paper over the block correctly and not getting ink all over the place. So that was a fun, meditative hour. I had some interest when I posted my test copy, so I think I'll sell the prints on Instagram once they're dry.

I also got an invitation to sign up for a demonstration slot at the fantastic nonprofit secondhand art and craft store, Austin Creative Reuse, during one of the weekends of the East Austin Studio Tour (which this year overlaps with the West Austin Studio Tour to become the Austin Studio Tour; the whole event has gotten out of hand and I love it but also it's overwhelming). Anyway, I'll be there from noon until 2:45 on Saturday, November 13, demonstrating the art of making mosaics using castoff and upcycled materials. I need to start planning what I'm going to make and how I'm going to make it in an attempt to get the maximum visual excitement out of a medium that can be slow and tedious, at least when it's in my hands.

I know! I should challenge myself to make mosaics seem as unappealing as humanly possible: Dull brown tiles on brown backgrounds. Overly detailed explanations delivered in a halting monotone. Discouraging looks, greasy hair, the occasional whiff of an odd smell that no one can quite identify. Swing on by ACR that afternoon to see how well I'm achieving my goal! 

P.S. This is the first post I've ctrl-F-searched for the word "just" before posting and come up with zero hits! I did have to delete one after I typed it, though. 

I just renewed this domain name for another year, plus my dad said he missed my blog and I thought that was really nice, so I'm going to put this personal comic here.  Maybe I will put some other things here soon too. 

The Superhappy mosaic is finished!

I think this is the best thing I've ever made. Tomorrow I will take some high-quality photos of the thing for my personal records and send it off to the person who commissioned it. 

If you want to read about the rest of the process, please follow me past the jump. 

See? I told you the mouths would go faster. One week. Boom!

I have to tweak a few things and then it's fill-in-all-the-faces time. Then grouting. Then confronting the cavernous void that is at the center of every adult life.

Or maybe I'll start another project; I haven't decided yet. 

Hey, I am working on a pretty involved project this summer!

The design might look familiar to some of you.

I used transfer paper to get the design onto the board.

Then I outlined the faces with little black tiles.

Then I started to fill in the eyes. This took me over a month; I had to cut each tile by hand to fit. 

The tile-cutting technique used to approximate a curve is called keystoning, and I got a lot of practice in it.

Sometimes it went well for a good stretch, and sometimes it got ridiculously fiddly. If I had to do it over again I would've drawn  the faces larger; I'm having to fudge some stuff to make the current design work as it is.

Yay! I finally finished filling in the eyes on Sunday. I felt triumphant--for about half an hour. There's still a lot to do here. 

Having to take frequent breaks to keep my back limber and peel globs of gross dried glue off my fingers is not speeding up this process at all, either. 

Sometimes I wish I'd started doing mosaics years ago, but I seriously doubt I had the patience for it until recently. I sort of can't believe I have the patience now. Getting older is cool in a lot of ways.

I was delighted to realize the mouths are going to go relatively quickly. It took about 20 minutes to fill all this in before work today.

I'd like to be finished with this in a month, but I can't tell if that's realistic or not. Probably not, but I am going to tile like hell and see. Onward!

(And no, I never finished the fox. Maybe by Christmas.)

I was really into the idea of doing a big, beautiful cactus mosaic, but the design wasn't coming together and then I decided I wanted to do an ocotillo instead, but then that was looking like it was really going to suck too. So I scrapped the whole thing.

Then I just lost all momentum. I spent my evenings drinking wine and sulking in front of the internet for a couple of weeks before deciding that maybe I needed to shift gears for a while.

Really, cut it out!

I also realized I needed to stop beating myself up for not doing something fun and creative every damn spare minute of the day. That's just stupid, as well as extremely counterproductive. (Plus Jesus, take a step back, I'm not not saving lives here. Everything will still go along just as it does if I don't glue some crap to a board or whatever.) 

Luckily, just as I had decided I was not necessarily creatively broken forever, I ran across some projects left over from last year when I had plenty of ideas and no time; now that I had some time and no ideas I was free to finish them up.

One turned out super crappy so I won't post it here, and another is a surprise for someone so ditto, but I can show you this lino cut I abandoned last spring but started again last week.

I need to clean it up a bit and I want to give it a caption, but it's largely finished now.

Once I started making progress on that, I felt much better. I drew a bunch of dumb little doodles and cut them out, just for fun.

This Saturday my friend Phyllis came over. The two of us drew a bunch of little doodles together and cut them out and used them to make a collage.

It rained all day, so that's where the weather theme came from. Eric sat at the table with us and worked on his own project and we played records and listened to the rain and shot the shit and made a goofy little art piece together. When we were finished we celebrated with a few margaritas. It was a great afternoon. 

Finally, yesterday I got this little dude from the housewares clearance aisle in Marshall's. I plan to tile her up and put her in the backyard. Should be a fast-ish project. 

So now art is fun again. The cactus/ocotillo/failure board will join the growing pile in the corner of my office of unfinished and unstarted projects. Some I'll pick up again and finish; some I will keep stumbling over until I decide to move them to the trash can out front. I'm learning that if something just isn't working that it really is okay to quit, at least for a while. There's only so much time and energy, you know?

I finished another project last night, although I'm not really sure what you'd use it for. A pretty tray to, uh, hold things? Like keys, and...treasures?

Yes, treasures. I will definitely put my treasures in there. Hell, I don't know. I'm happy with how it turned out, though. 

These tiles were a pain in the ass to cut because they kept splintering, but they're really pretty so at least that aspect made them somewhat enjoyable to work with.

I like the look of the vertical patterns, and I've gotten a lot faster and more adept at laying them down. But it's time to challenge myself a little more and give the vertical tile thing a break for a while. (Unless you want something with vertical tiles on it--I absolutely take commissions!)

I'm thinking this photo would be fun to do a mosaic of. I took it on a hike last month in Big Bend Ranch State Park, the national park's less visited, more rugged sister.

While I was deciding what to do and how to do it, I wandered over to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission building, the front of which bears six beautiful mosaic seals, in search of a little prickly pear tiling inspiration.

Look at this craziness! So beautiful, right? If you look closely, you can see the artist even included the damn needles!

I'm going for a different style (and ok, I'm also nowhere near that level), but it was cool and informative to see how something like this can be done. I'll post pictures of my progress, so check back from time to time, all right?