Category Archives: illustrations

September 7, 2016 · 3:02 pm

“Unfortunately, you are a Writer,” He Said.

I have made up my mind to risk investing more money in getting another book published.  Being an author, especially an unknown Indie author, is really just an expensive hobby.  Even investing in professional editorial services and print-on-demand publishers can’t help you make any money at it, even if you are talented and good at story-telling.  The best I can really hope for is to get my books in print and pray that people will discover them and like them after I die, beaten to death for a crust of bread in debtor’s prison.

So, why would anyone in their right mind want to be a writer?

It is entirely possible that I was simply born that way.  I have been drawing cartoons and telling stories since I was about five years old.  Maybe even before that.  I don’t have many clear memories of my pre-school years.  It is possible that I was lost in a library once… or dropped on my head… or in a library and having a book dropped on my head… something set it off if it wasn’t simply in my genes.

I am planning to publish Magical Miss Morgan with Page Publishing.  They are a pay-to-print publisher who are slightly more affordable than I-Universe that I used to get Catch a Falling Star into print.  I feel like I have to get it published before I die because it is the distillation of my entire life as a classroom teacher.  Books like this are important to me.  In the Bible, there are prophets and holy men who are filled with the Word of God, men like Jeremiah, that claim the Word is burning within them, and will burn its way out of them if they don’t speak it.  My stories that I am working at turning into books are like that.  They are consuming me from the inside out.  I have to get them written and printed if I possibly can.

I have recently tried and failed to get novels like Snow Babies, Magical Miss Morgan, and Superchicken published with publishers that don’t charge for their services.   I got several rejections and one contract that came to nothing because of the economic failings of the publisher.  I have tried being infinitely patient.  It doesn’t work.

Cool School Blue

I will try to bargain for the most affordable deal I can to get Magical Miss Morgan into print.  They will apparently let me input artwork into the final cover.  I understand that successful writers tend to starve for at least fifteen years before they see any success and profit.  At best, I have six more years of that to go.  But this, after all, is my life now.  I need to write books and I need to get them published.  I am, unfortunately, a Writer.

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July 31, 2016 · 3:24 pm

What Do Martians Look Like?

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As Catch a Falling Star was a science-fictiony sort of comedy, one of the questions that I have pursued in internet research is the one I have presented here in the title of this picture-and-Paffooney-filled post.  Seriously, the image search of Google’s answer to that question is enough to make you snort milk through the old nostrils as you sort through them while stupidly drinking a glass of milk.  The milky nose-snorts are the reason I have not sited picture sources on this post.  Cleaning the computer screen took too long.  I have merely randomly snatched and pirated pictures.  The only picture of a Martian presented here created by me are these two;

I admit to being surprised by my actual research into the whole question of whether or not we have ever been visited by intelligent life from the stars beyond the sky.  While I have not found proof that aliens exist, I have discovered there is actual proof that the government, and NASA in particular, have covered something up.  And it goes beyond Area 51 defense research.  But now that I have got the attention of the NSA and the Men in Black, this post is only filled with a collage of the unreal, made-up, and mostly silly.

Malevolent Martians;

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Martians Who Make the Mistake of Liking Us;

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Inexplicably Goofy Martians;

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Cartoon alien rendered on white background. 3D model licensed from DAZ3D.

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Probably the only REAL Martians… from the future;

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July 5, 2016 · 3:39 pm

Stardusters… Canto Two

I am trying to follow through with my insane writing plan to post a chapter from this unfinished Sci-Fi novel every Tuesday.  So, here is the second installment of my comedy about the end of the world if it was a lizard world, which it isn’t… or, at least, we hope it isn’t.

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Canto Two – Xiar’s Captain’s Quarters

“What do you mean by Galtorr Prime?” shouted Captain Xiar at his first officer and his first officer’s Earther primate wife.  The Captain had inherited his rank rather than earned it, so he firmly believed that shouting was the key ingredient in good leadership.  “We can’t be at Galtorr Prime.  That’s the worst place for us to be.”

“This was not the plan, Captain,” said Biznap.  “We arrived here by accident.”

“Well, reverse the process.  Even going back to Earth is better than here!”

“Well…” Biznap scraped the floor with his foot.  “The thing is… we can’t.”

“What?  Why?”

“We corrected a fundamental flaw in the program that has been there for over a hundred years.  The astrogator has been rebooted with a new primary Sleer seed.  It can’t find the coordinates for Barnard’s Star or for Earth either one.   It will just calculate up a spot in empty space.  We have been travelling using the wrong coordinates for more than a century.”

“Why can’t we go back to those coordinates?”

“They are now gone from the system.”

“How could this happen?”

Harmony Castille, the beautiful blonde Sunday school teacher, raised her hand.  “It’s my fault.  I corrected the math and caused the system to operate on new coordinates.”

“Really, Captain,” said Biznap. “It turns out we have been operating with faulty math for too long.  Now that we’re doing it right, the machine won’t go back to the old, wrong system.  We would have to map out new coordinates all over again.  Re-explore the entire empire.”

“So you are telling me we have no choice but to live in orbit around the most dangerous planet in existence?”

“No, it is worse than that.  No longer recycling protein by eating our tadpoles means we have to find new food sources on the planet below.  We are going to have to establish a downport colony to continue to survive and grow as a community.”

Xiar sat down on his resting pad thoroughly stunned.  His new wife, Shalar, beautiful and green and wearing only the satin robe made for her by the Morrells, put both arms around Xiar’s thick green neck.

“What do we know about the Galtorrians, dearest?” she asked innocently.  Hugging behaviors were entirely new to Tellerons.  They had seen humans do it countless times on Earther television, such as the I Love Lucy show that Tellerons loved so deeply, but they had never practiced it until Alden and Gracie Morrell had adopted Xiar’s son Davalon who Xiar had nearly marooned on Earth (accidentally).  They had shown him how to do it as they showed him how to actually be a good parent.  Xiar found it totally alien… but he liked it.

“I don’t really know.  We have to get Farbick to work on it right away, but I believe they are lizard-men who eat meat and fight wars.”

“We knew the Earthers ate meat and fought wars,” reminded Shalar.  “They didn’t turn out to be so terrible.  In fact, we learned a lot about them.   They were very kind and generous to us.”

“Do you really think we can be so badly mistaken about two races we believed to be our enemies?  One was unlikely enough.”

“I really fear we are not mistaken this time,” said Biznap.

“Do we have their broadcasts to monitor?” asked Shalar, “We had a wealth of information at the tips of our sucker pads last time thanks to the broadcasts.”

“No signals at all,” sighed Harmony.  “It’s like they haven’t invented TV or radio yet.”

“Maybe our superior technology will help us this time,” suggested Biznap.

“Not when guided by stupid brains,” moaned Xiar.  “This time we are surely lost.”

“Don’t give up before trying,” said Harmony.  “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

“I don’t know who your Lord is,” said Xiar, “But fire up the ritual laser lights and let’s get praying.  We need all the help we can get.  Do we need to consider sacrificing a few tadpoles or junior officers?  What appeases your god?”

“Ach!  Educating heathens can be such a trial!” swore Harmony.  “Let me get my Bible.  I have some serious educating to do.”

*****

So, there you have chapter two, which probably makes no sense whatsoever, unless you read chapter one… or possibly bought and read my published novel Catch a Falling Star.  Tricky about shameless self-promotion, ain’t I?

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June 29, 2016 · 3:25 pm

Granny Quest 2016; Not the Conclusion, but Close

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Here is the result of my colored-pencil push for Granny Quest 2016.  This is not the final picture of Grandma Gretel Stein that I will need to do in the course of this novel project.  But it is the first real accomplishment in defining what she actually looks like.  Work continues on the novel, but today is a busy day.  My wife is returning from a month in the Philippines today.  My son is taking driver’s education as I write this.  My daughter is busy trying to clean the messy house that I have characterized as Muck Man’s Swamp in previous humorous posts with a superhero theme and an unfortunately too-accurate-to-be-weathered-without-shame sort of basis in fact.  The Princess is determined to reach a point where she can invite friends over this summer without having to claim she was kidnapped and raised by a tribe of baboons.  So, as always, the potential for utter disaster looms large, and I anticipate having something to write about where I can turn disaster into laughter.  It’s what I do.  It is my real super power.  (Although the stunning of villains with pungent odors thing is also pretty effective and pretty nearly reality.)

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June 27, 2016 · 4:34 pm

Granny-Quest 2016 Continues

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I may have found my Granny model.   There are certain requirements to make a proper German grandmother.  She has to have a face as sweet as Apfelstrudel (that’s German for apple strudel), and yet, be a typical square-headed German.  This is an illustration model sheet, meaning it will be used as a guide for later illustrations.  But I intend to take it a step further and do a colored-pencil version on top of this pen and ink base.

You may have noticed the little person in the picture.  He’s a little too small and too oddly dressed to be an ordinary child.  In fact, he is General Tuffaney Swift, a Storybook fairy who got his immortality from the stories of Tom Thumb.  He is a gifted warrior and is one of the primary defenders of the fairy kingdom of Tellosia which is hidden in plain sight in the midst of my little Iowa hometown.  He’s a character that I have been developing since I was in high school.  There is evidence of this claim in this old colored pencil drawing from the 1970’s;

Swift

You see, the story of Recipes for Gingerbread Children involves the fairies of Tellosia and a sweet old German lady who likes to bake sweets and cookies and tell fairy stories.   And it is a novel project that is swiftly absorbing my whole life.  It’s funny, but that’s pretty much what happened with Snow Babies and Magical Miss Morgan. My best writing seems to come from brain bursts of inspiration that force me to put aside scheduled projects and spend all my efforts, even my blog posts, furthering the story.  Soon I will be all in.  I just need the right picture of a cute German grandmother.

 

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June 19, 2016 · 2:06 pm

Follow-Ups

Unfinished Stag

Remember this picture that I said was unfinished?  It was supposed to be a picture called The Stag in Snow.  But I was always reluctant to dab the snowflakes on over top of the picture I basically felt was good the way it was.  So, I have experimented with art editing programs to the point of putting snow flakes into the picture without risking spoiling the original with blobs of white paint.

Unfinished Stag n snow

I successfully added snowflakes to the blue background.  I couldn’t help but feel like it is a starry night in the background rather than snowfall.  And so I saved this product separately before continuing to experiment.

Stag n snow

The final product faithfully carried out my original plan.  And it does look like a rather mechanical snowfall.  But I don’t like it as much as I like the starry background step.  It makes me truly glad that I did not put white paint on the original.  I would be happy to have your opinion in the comments.  Of course that is also a tricky way to make you reveal whether you are actually reading the words of this post or just looking at the pictures.

 

 

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June 15, 2016 · 4:08 pm

Inside Toonerville

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The Toonerville Post Office and Bert Buchanan’s Toy Store.

Toonerville is not only a wonderful cartoon place created by Fontaine Fox in the 1930’s, but the name of the town that inhabited my HO Train Layout when I lived in South Texas and had the Trolley actually running nearly on time.  The train layout has not been restored to working condition for over a decade now.  The buildings which I mostly built from kits or bought as plaster or ceramic sculptures and repainted have been sitting on bookshelves in all that time.  I still have delusions of rebuilding the train set in the garage, but it is becoming increasingly less and less likely as time goes on and my working parts continue to stiffen up and stop working.  So, what will I do with Toonerville?

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Wilma Wortle waits on the station platform for her train at the Toonerville Train station. I built this kit in the 1970’s, hence the accumulations of dust bunnies.

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Loew’s Theater has been awaiting the start of The African Queen for more than twenty years.

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Main Street Toonerville at 2:25 in the afternoon. Or is it three? The courthouse clock is often slow.

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Grandma Wortle who controls all the money in the family likes to park her car near the eggplant house when she visit’s Al’s General Store.

But I may yet have found a way to put Toonerville back together through computer-assisted artsy craftsy endeavors.

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A two-shot of Bill Freen’s house and Slappy Coogan’s place on the photo set to start production.

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Bill Freen’s house lit up with newfangled electricical. (and I do believe that is the way Bill spells it all good and proper.)

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Bill Freen’s house cut out in the paint program.

So I can make composite pictures of Toonerville with realistic photo-shopped backgrounds.  Now, I know only goofy old artsy fartsy geeks like me get excited about doofy little things like this, but my flabber is completely gasted with the possibilities.

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Bill Freen’s house at sunset… (but I don’t get why there’s snow on the roof when the grass is so green?)

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April 26, 2016 · 12:14 pm

Pirate Novels

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My first novel-length piece of writing was attempted in college.  I finished it in four years.  It was a pirate tale about a young man, a pirate named Graff the Changeling.  You see him in this illustration I created in 1980 with his two young sons, Rene and Emery.  Because their mother was a fairy, the boys have pointed ears and horns.    It was an attempt at serious fantasy adventure fiction that was so awful, it became a comedy before it was through.  I called it The Graff Tales, and I still have it.  But I promise you, I will never, ever try to publish the horrible thing.  My sisters served as my beta readers for this story.  They both liked the oral stories I told, and they eagerly awaited something like they remembered from our shared childhood.  They both were a bit disappointed by my first prose attempt.  There was a knight called Sir Rosewall in the story.  He was a hapless knighted fool who lived in poverty and swore to reclaim his honor with great deeds, but as he goes to sea as a kidnapped sailor, all he manages to do is fall down a lot and bump his large head frequently.  In the first scene when he enters the story, long about chapter four, he exits a cottage and has to punt a piglet to get out without falling down.  This pig-punting thing was repeated more than once with this character.  My sisters joked that the “pig-in-the-doorway” motif would be my lasting contribution to literature.  Fortunately for me, it was not.  I am probably the only one who even remembers there was such a novel.

But my biggest failing with writing and storytelling was always that I could be too creative.  The story featured a flying pirate ship that was raised from the bottom of the ocean by fairy magic.  The crew were re-animated skeletons.  The gorilla who lived on the island where the ship’s survivors had been marooned would also join the crew.  His name was Hairy Arnold.  One villain was the pirate captain Horner, a man with a silver nose-piece because he had lost his real nose to a cannon shot.  Another was a red-bearded dandy named Captain Dangerous.  But the biggest villain of all was the Heretic, who turned out to be a demon in human guise.  It was all about escaping from pirates who wanted to kill you and hitting soldiers with fish in the fish market.  There were crocodile-headed men and little child-like fairies called Peris that lived in the city where Graff was trapped and transformed into a monster by the Heretic.

My plot was too convoluted and my characters too wildly diverse and unlikely.  The result was something far too bizarre to be serious fiction.  The only way it could actually be interpreted was as a piece of comedy.  There-in lay the solution to my identity problem as a writer.  I had to stop trying to be serious.  My imagination too often bent the rules of physics and reality.  So I had to stop trying for realism and believability.

 

In the end all the main characters die.  All except for young Rene who becomes a pirate hunter.  Of course, I follow Graff and Emery through to heaven because, well, it was a first person narrative and the narrator died.  So, I vowed to myself that I would never let this horrible piece of nonsense see the light of day.  I would never try to publish it, rewrite it, or even tell anyone about it.  And so to this very day I… oopsie.

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April 25, 2016 · 2:45 am

Oopsie… I forgetted

My last post was about the movie Jungle Book and how happy I was at the beauty of that movie which fulfilled my childhood love affair with that story.  But I failed to share my own Paffoonies created from the story of the boy raised by wolves in the Seonee Hills.

So here they are… although they are late;

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This last one is a picture from a page in my wizardly tome of picture magic.  The poem is called “Nobody Knows Why” and is interpreted here in case you can’t read the Mickian script in the Paffooney.  Here is the text of the poem;

Nobody Knows Why

The world turns

And I must die

And ‘morrow comes

And Russians spy

And Doo-dahs Doo-dah

And Blueberry pie

And Monkeys shake

When they hear a Lie!

The mysteries in the meaning of this poem is supposed to remain a mystery.  It is from a magical tome that belongs to a wizard.  So, for all I know, it could be a very dangerous incantation.  So don’t you dare try to figure it out.  You don’t want to be a Monkey, do you?

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April 13, 2016 · 2:55 pm

Pen and Ink

4th Dimension

Simple lines and line-drawn figures can contain the wisdom of the world.  It is a simple faith that can turn one into a cartoonist, a comic book artist, or an illustrator.  It is an almost god-like power.  You can make fools and geeks and little girls with fourth dimensional hoola-hoops come to life.

 

It has been said by some who’ve seen my line drawings, my pen-and-ink cartoons, that I am good at it.  But what do they know?  I’ve shown you in this blog some of the real greats.  Wally Wood and Milt Caniff and Cliff Sterret and George Herriman and Charles Shultz are all better than I am.  But I am at least smart enough to have learned things from them.

Elf on Patrol

Black and white lines and shapes can convey feeling in almost the same way that words can.  You can express feelings of melancholy, fatigue, or joy.  You can create a sense of adventure, or make someone laugh with a clever reversal of expectations.

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So there you have it.  I am not really that good… not a master of the art.  But I know it.  I can appreciate it when I see it.  And there are things I can use it to accomplish.

MickeyX22

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