I have been working at illustration and drawing for the majority of my life, but it took computer technology and digital photography to allow me to maximize the use of my abilities. Let me go through a couple of case in points.
The Red-Haired Girl picture is a good example of what I can do. I originally drew the picture to illustrate a Charlie Brown poem. Here is the poem if you don’t remember it. (A convenient excuse to re-post something and fill this post with words already written.)
Little Red-Haired Girl
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
That little red-haired girl, so cute, so nice
You only looked and looked from afar
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
You could’ve held her hand
You could’ve walked her home from school
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
She never got your Valentine
At least, you forgot to sign your name
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
No hope of marriage now, nor children for old age
Happily ever after has now long gone
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
Now every love poem is a sad poem
And the world is blue and down
You never told her that you loved her…
You never told her that you loved her…
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown.
You may not see what I did without looking at the two pictures very closely. The better, more brightly-lit photo is not the answer. I originally created the Red-Haired Girl as a Charley-Brown-y creation complete with a bigger than natural head, a Charley-Brown head.
I have ulterior motives for my evil cartoon manipulations. I like this image I have created very much, in fact, one might say that I have fallen in love with it just a bit… Pygmalion-like. I wanted to use the image to illustrate Anita Jones, a character from my book Superchicken. Anita is the fictional re-imagining of a girl that I had a deep and abiding crush on (possibly still existing today, though she is now a grandmother in real life.) She is literally my little red-haired girl. So what did I do? Look closely. I lovingly shrank her head. Yes, like the headhunters of old, I used the paint program on my computer to shrink it, re-attach it, and make it more human-like. Realistic proportions, though only a very slight change by actual percentages, make a realistic difference in how real the viewer perceives her to be.
I know you probably think I am full of goofy-gas to make such claims. If you don’t see the difference in the first example, perhaps you will see it here. Compare these two David Copperfield pictures carefully. Look at Little Emily’s head.
You don’t have to believe me, but it does make a difference.
Catch a Falling Star 
Sunday Silly Artistical Posts
I like to dig through old piles of artwork I have done to re-purpose things and mash things together to make weird art salad.
I used to play a Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game called Talislanta with groups of adolescent boys, most of whom had previously been my students in middle school. It was a weird world where weird things made artistical challenges for me that taught me to be a better and more imaginative artist.
Xeribeth was a member of an almost-human race that had yellow skin and wore colorful face tattoos. She also had to be somewhat alluring to trick adolescent boys into undertaking dangerous and possibly suicidal adventures (meaning characters who only lived on paper might die and have to be re-rolled with dungeon dice.)
Zoric, being a green Cymrillian wizard, gave me numerous opportunities to create Kermit-the-frog-colored portraits. And he was a player character, so his greed and penchant for unwise actions decided on in the heat of battle (like turning himself into a fish-man while adventuring in the waterless desert) didn’t come from me.
Playing those games gave me training as a story-teller as well.
My efforts to see color with gradually worsening color-blindness led me to create eye-bashing color compositions that attempt to portray realistically things and feelings that can’t possibly be physically real. Thus I gradually became, over time, a surrealist (a juxtaposer of unlike and jarring things to deliver a visionary picture of reality) (How’s that for surrealistic gobbeldegook in definition form?)
I often solve the problems of my life by drawing something and making cartoonish comments with serious consequences.
Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that the world on the inside of me is decidedly different than the world on the outside of me. But I have to live in both. And I can do that by drawing my colored-pencil Paffooney stuff, posting it, and writing about it on a silly Sunday.
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