Category Archives: artwork
What Next?
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
Novel Number 11
It is now published and available on Amazon.
A Mini-Comic for Art Day
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
More Saturday Artwork
I do not have any particular theme for this gallery post. I just want to post again pictures that I love and have hanging on my wall to study constantly. I don’t know what it is about these random images that make them dear to me… but I love them.
You know how they say that every portrait an artist does is really a self-portrait… Well, this one was always intended to be. I was ten.
Pen-and-Inky Art Day
Pen and ink, black and white drawings are the place where my art career started. Line drawings like the ones in the newspaper cartoon pages. I collected newspaper comics. I copied them. I drew Blondie Bumstead and Moonshine McSwine naked. I drew Pogo Possum, Popeye, and Hagar the Horrible. I also drew Steve Canyon and Buzz Sawyer. I still draw Mickey Mouse. I learned cartoonist skills from the best in comic strips and comic books.
Filed under artwork, cartoons, comic strips, drawing, humor, illustrations, Paffooney, pen and ink
Saturday Is Art Day… Again
I draw things as illustrations to stories. Take, for example, the protagonist and hero of Catch a Falling Star.
Dorin Dobbs is boy from Iowa. That tells you some terrible things about him right there.
He was ten in 1990.
He hated girls.
He met some pretty green-skinned girls from outer space, amphibianoid frog-girls with fins on their heads. He danced with them to Mickey Mouse Club music while he was their prisoner on a sectet base on the planet Mars. They were dancing naked in the nutrient bath that all Telleron tadpoles use daily.
Brekka and Menolly are two of the Telleron frog girls with fins on their heads. They love Earth music in the 1990’s. They are background characters in Catch a Falling Star. They are main characters in the book Stardusters and Space Lizards, where they help Davalon and Tanith to conquer the dying planet of Galtorr Prime after the Telleron invasion of Earth failed in the previous book.
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Galtorr Prime is undergoing drastic climate change and environmental collapse and ends up being saved by superior Telleron technology and the lizard-girl heroine, Sizzahl, who has a plan for fixing the atmosphere and saving fundamental eco-systems. Of course, this is all science fiction-y stuff based entirely on fantasy and imagination and has nothing to do with the real world we now live in.
Of course, not all characters I illustrate are people or aliens.
Millis, Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit, is an ordinary albino bunny who eats a piece of alien technology that evolves him into a talking, walking-on-two-legs, near-human form.
He becomes the chef (who cooks only vegetable dishes) for Norwall, Iowa’s own mad scientist, Orben Wallace, in the book The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.
I think I have now given out far more spoilers for stories than I have any right to do. But the thing about character illustrations is that your get to know the characters at a glance. And to know them is to love them.
Filed under aliens, artwork, characters, illustrations, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
More Saturday Art
I don’t believe my art will ever be gallery quality. I don’t know how long any of it can survive my own demise. My family is not overly concerned with preserving my piles of drawings and paintings. And I am not Van Gogh.
What I am is a hoarder of the things I have created. And one hope I have is that posting these things online will extend their existence at least for a little while.
I would remind you that I am a surrealist by choice. I generally juxtapose things and ideas and images that ate opposed in their interpretive import.
Filed under artwork, imagination, Paffooney
Saturday is Art Day!
If I am not going to publish a Hidden Kingdom page every Saturday, I am going to commit to a feature where I post artwork on Saturday. Saturday art fairs are a thing. And I have gotten far more interest in my artwork from WordPress than I ever have from a local art show. So what if I can’t win blue ribbons online?
There is a certain magical quality about the way that over time you can build a portfolio of many parts, and pictures have many uses.
Is it possible that artworks taken all together are like an autobiography??
In some sense, every portrait the artist draws is a self portrait. Every scene, object, and image is a part of the artist’s ultimate story.
So, do you like my gallery? You can always leave a comment or an insult. You are the viewer, and what you do with this is entirely up to you.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, Paffooney
Dreams of the Mastiff
As a comic cartoonist sort of artist named Mickey, I was as a teenager obsessed with making artsy goofy books. One of those was unaccountably called Dreams of the Mastiff. These surrealistic picturations are examples from that silly Donald-Duck thing.
This page is supposed to explain the title. So I guess all of the following pages are somehow supposed to be from the nighttime brain of the dog in the nursery.
And what is this supposed to be about? My old-man memory has not a single clue.
It occurred to me long ago that both Fantasy and Science Fiction were surreal by nature. What is the story behind Black Peter? Ich weiss nicht! I do not know! Old-man memory again.
Inexplicable Sci-Fi from this little surrealist art-book-thing.
And more of the same…
Now back to cockroaches from doggy dreams…
…And mice, monkeys, and tea-drinking ladybird beetles…
…And what…? The whole world in a nutshell?
To a thing I used in two novels, Catch a Falling Star and The Baby Werewolf.
I offer no explanations or excuses for these nonsensical and unaccountable things. I am not sorry I once did them, if you want to know the truth… but I probably should be.
