Today’s Art-Day Saturday post is about the pictures I have drawn to establish in my mind the characters that make up the fictional world of Norwall, Iowa. Specifically, the kids in my YA novels.
I do manage character development and detailed descriptions by creating early on a picture of what the character looks like for me.
Filed under artwork, characters, humor, illustrations, kids, novel writing, Paffooney, Pirates
Hop aboard the Mickian Paffooney school bus. We are headed for a bit of loony-time wacky weirdness and other things to learn sponsored by the letter “W”.
The cast of characters is somehow almost recognizable in spite of spots and stripes and clownish clues.
And dangers like tygers are hidden in every jungle mile of the cartoon landscape.
And one never knows how the physics of the situation will play out in the science of the basic script.
And heroines quite formidable present themselves confident, competent, and ready for battle.
And of course, there are villains, introducing chaos, messing up our lives, and becoming President of the United States.
But life is a wild car chase complete with alligators and flying saucers.
And it is difficult to determine what is actually true, and what is nothing more than hoo-haw.
Here’s a bit of the file called Novel Pix (illustrations for my novels);
Filed under artwork, illustrations, Paffooney
This is a picture from the portfolio I keep of old drawings and paintings. It is from the 1970’s. It gives me a window into the artistic process. I can look at this and compare it to more recent work to see what progress I have made, how far I have come from then to now.
This is the latest one to make its way from my portfolio to the scanner. It was drawn with colored pencil in 1980 (As you can see in the corner if your eyes are better than mine. A portfolio is a magical thing. It preserves the fruits of the talents of the past for the use in the present, and in the future.
One of the things that makes me an artist is my love of color.
Oddly, my love of color comes partly from my partial color-blindness. I was diagnosed as having a red-and-green color-blindness, just as my Great Grandma Hinckley had life long, culminating in total black-and-white vision in her 90’s. The realization that I did not see colors as vividly as other people do gave me motivation to appreciate colors more, and ramp up the brightness and the contrasts of the colors I used in my artwork.
Color conveys emotion. It also makes your perceptions change, conform, and reshape themselves according to the artist’s use of the color. It allows the artist to reach into your heart and your head and change things.
If I have manipulated you with color and done something to your insides that I probably shouldn’t have done, I apologize. But, then again, I don’t apologize. It is simply what an artist does.
Filed under artwork
So, now that I have finished another novel that I have been working on for more than twenty years, I have decided to turn away from the hometown novels and take up some science fiction/humor again.
And I, of course, am not smart enough by any stretch of the imagination to avoid choosing my disastrous first novel from 2007, AeroQuest. This particular novel is spectacularly in need of a serious overhaul and re-write.
First of all, it has too large of a cast with new characters introduced in almost every Canto (what I inexplicably re-name chapters). Likewise they are interacting in too many different settings and planets and spaceships without enough individual explication of each. It screams out in agony to be divided into smaller chunks and both expanded and simplified.
The first book, Stars and Stones, will be centered on the planet Don’t Go Here. That, of course, is a bizarre world populated entirely by sentient beings who were marooned on the planet by pirates and space wolves. Even more bizarre, the populous has responded to a growing population with limited resources by adopting a caveman culture based on a lone cartoon holovid of The Flintstones.
The characters and the plot-lines will be pared down and simplified.
And, having done some work on AeroQuest 1 already, I also got a headstart on AeroQuest 2 by creating a cover for it.
So, you can clearly see that my daft plan is to re-write that simply awful book as a trilogy. A Sci-Fi trilogy? Wherever did I get a foolish idea like that?
Well, I always claimed that the original was half-inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy, and half-inspired by Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So, that should make for one seriously off-kilter mutant amalgamation of a book series.
Filed under artwork, humor, new projects, novel, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, Uncategorized
It is now published and available on Amazon.
Here is a brief and very surrealistic comic story that I have published before… but a long time ago.
I know it is a bit bizarre, and hard to tell what the theme really is… but isn’t that what art is really for? Telling highly personal stories that make you think hard about seeing things through the eyes of an artist.
Filed under artwork, comic strips, foolishness, horror writing, humor, Paffooney, surrealism
Catch a Falling Star 