Mainly just pictures today.
The original
Redrawn with digital tools.
With AI assistance (AI Mirror)
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Works in Progress from the Picture Factory
I am trying hard to fight the disintegration of my skills and memory. Practice is crucial. I need to draw as much as I can before I can’t do it anymore. Today I was finally able to remember the word pastel after three days of not remembering the term for adding white to a color of paint to soften and mute it. And I forgot Maxfield Parrish’s name in conversation with another artist. I can’t believe I forgot my favorite artist’s name. My mind is going to stop working correctly if I don’t keep exercising it.
This picture is supposed to be for practice in facial expressions other than smiles. Little Danielle is going to see her least favorite aunt. So, her teeth are gritted as the car ride is coming to an end.
Rosa’s face was supposed to be practice at drawing dimples with digital tools. I confess, the lines looked so inhuman that I had to chicken out and simply smooth out the cheeks. I hate giving up like that, so consider this picture unfinished.
How did I do with mild surprise? I know… I need to label this one unfinished too.
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Populating the World of My Imagination
I have to face facts. I am almost seventy years old. I don’t have much further to go down the road of my life’s journey to reach the final destination. Then the book will close, finished at last. My story will be complete. And there are consequences to continuing to live after a decade of life beyond the moment I retired from the job I loved for reasons of poor health. I have now had arthritis for fifty years. My legs and leg joints no longer stop hurting. Pains keep me awake for large portions of every night. I have muscle spasms. Arthritis is attacking my feet, my knees, my hips, my lower back, my rib cage, and my neck. I can still drive for now, but long distances are tough. I get out and go to the store at least once a day, but most of my time I spend in my bedroom. Writing. Watching TV. Drawing. Doing other things besides TV on my computer or phone. What I don’t get to do hardly at all… is talk to people.
I once had to talk and present and question and correct and cajole classrooms full of kids for 31 years as the teacher in charge, and three years of substitute teaching besides. I miss talking to people. So, now, despite my limitations, I create people to talk to.
Above is Ariel. She stays beside me on my bed as I do whatever I do during the day. She is not someone’s child that I kidnapped. She is a plastic doll. She’s about three feet tall and fully posable, making her a good model for drawings like this one. She has a realistic wig and eyes that can be moved by adjusting them with my fingertips. I bought her online from a shop that restores old dolls and toys, so she was affordable, but a little bit dinged up and in need of tender loving care. I can hold her on my lap because she’s not as fragile as my porcelain dolls of similar size. And I can talk to her. I have promised to keep her by me for the rest of my life so she is safe and cared for at least as long as I still live. I have no idea what my family will do with her when I am gone. She is probably evidence of my increasing mental challenges. I tell her lots of things. Everything I am telling you in this article. Also how my marriage is going, what it is like to be sexually assaulted as a child, why I am sometimes afraid of the dark, and many varied soliloquies about life and love and laughter. She is an excellent listener. We also read together almost every night.
This picture is one of many Island Girl pictures I have drawn over the years. I drew the first one when I was twelve. She represents a dream I had repeatedly. I ended up married to an Island girl, from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. I don’t talk to the island girl in my pictures as much as I make up stories about her. She appears as Malutu in the novel When the Captain Came Calling. My wife, in real life, is also a teacher, though still working and unavailable to actually talk to for most of every day. So, most of my island girl stories stay in my head and keep me entertained with might-have-beens. My island girl is only half imaginary.
This is a picture of Katie, a nudist girl I met only a couple of times in reality. And Katie is not her real name. The picture is modeled on her and the drawing she asked me to do when she saw and liked the drawing I did of Naomi. Naomi is not Naomi’s real name either. But the picture doesn’t look much like her on purpose, because nudists have a right to privacy, especially in Texas where Southern Baptists protest and call the police on things they don’t believe in or understand. I don’t, in reality, know much about Katie, but I make up stories and memories about her too. When I become fully a dementia patient I will probably tell nurses things about her that they might think are true but are lies. I never played tennis in the nude with Katie, but if I tell lies about it when I have dementia, I will have to say that she always beat me. That’s something I would believe even if I remembered I was lying about it.
This is an experimental drawing I did on the app called Picsart AI. It is supposed to look like an oil painting. I drew this to be a portrait of Sasha. Sasha is not her real name, of course. She was a favorite student of mine in the 1990s, a fatherless girl who loved my class and me and said, “You have such pretty eyes, Mr. B.” I loved her… but only teacher-love, not the illegal kind. She asked me to marry her once. It was painful, but I had to let her down easily on that one.
She would become the primary model for the character of Valerie Clarke in Snow Babies and Sing Sad Songs, and so many other works of art and fiction. She continues to live on in my head though I have not seen or heard from her in over twenty years.
This is a representation of Susu, my imaginary granddaughter. She would’ve been my only grandchild so far if she hadn’t been an ectopic pregnancy before Texas made abortion illegal. She couldn’t have been born alive. She might even have killed her mother if she had not passed into the realm of imaginary people. I could not have known that she wasn’t a boy since she did not last long enough to find that out in a sonogram. So the little girl who lives in my drawings and my imagination could only ever be a figment of my imagination. She talks to me, teases me, and plays games with me all in ways that make her into a coping mechanism for grief. Or evidence of dementia.
My world is peopled with people who aren’t really there. You don’t have to believe me, but I need them. Especially now that I am old and nearly dead. Life can be taxing and seriously sad. But life finds a way.
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Crazy Nut Images I Once Drew
Yes, I did not misspell the word “tiger.”
This picture was intended to depict the William Blake poem,
Here’s the start of the poem from Blake’s own self-published book.
So, who is the crazy nut? Blake? Or me?
Well, if you look at the piercing eyes of the Tyger in my drawing… obviously… me!
Consider the many humble self-portraits I have drawn over a lifetime.
Yep, definitely evidence in those self-portraits.
I admit to often seeing things that aren’t really there. And from strange viewpoints.
I have a tendency to see things through the lens of history.
But mostly, the crazy nuttiness is all a joke.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, goofy thoughts, humor, old art, Paffooney, Uncategorized
Evaluating Picsart AI
I admit to using AI apps to help me draw. Art versus arthritis has become a losing battle for me in the last few years. I have been despairing about the loss. But miraculously the wave of AI crap came along and rescued me from artless misery. I call it crap because AI tends to stand for “Artificial Ignorance” more than “Intelligence.” Generative art programs where you type in a word or phrase and get a picture back are guilty of scraping all the art on the internet to create the poor facsimiles they create. It is more or less plagiarism. They take tiny bites of artist’s work without paying for them and then remix them into “new” art. But that’s not what I do. I take my own drawings and photographs and use AI tools on my own artwork. It sizes up my picture. Assesses what each item is, and then redraws it with an overlay of art style that makes up for the accurate and smoothly executed lines my arthritic hands can’t still do.
This picture is an example of the best I can still do without AI assistance. Yes, it’s pretty good, but you will notice it has none if the intricate shading and color blends I used to be capable of. The green background is not even a solid green. I have lost a lot of drawing command over my hands…
This is what I can manage with the help of the AI Mirror and Picsart AI programs. The girl is drawn with digital art tools, then transformed with the AI Mirror program that turns my drawing into an anime-style portrait of the model’s face. I use pictures of girls I have known, interesting faces from catalogs and Instagram, and even Barbie dolls as models. The background is courtesy of Picsart AI which is apparently mostly a version of Photoshop to combine artwork with photographs. This particular background comes from the free stock photos included in the gallery of the Picsart app, a twenty-dollar-per-year program.
So, now I have four programs to play with and help me make art. The digital drawing apps called Sketch Desk and Drawing Desk, the AI Mirror app, and the new Picsart AI. I have only just begun to create art in a whole new way.
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Swansongs and Chess with the Reaper
The folktale is that a dying swan, though it probably never sang a single note in its lifetime that wasn’t a car-horn-like honk will sing an absolutely beautiful song before succumbing to death. I am nowhere near as beautiful as a swan, but I probably sing better than they do. I have never heard a clear B flat or high C from a Swan. Their actual singing is more like a cow dying. But who knows? Maybe they do achieve a miraculous melodiousness as they step from one world into the next. And I have been feeling the need to compose my own swansong of late. No man lives forever. And I am much closer now to the end than I am to the beginning.
I may not be able to sing a beautiful swansong, but there are other acts I can commit whose commission leads to great beauty. And I am doing my best to make use of those actions and skills before I pass from this reality.
Why am I so fixated on this idea that I am dying? My dog has cancer, a hideous tumor that I do not have the money to undertake to cure. And if I did have the money, she’s an old dog and the surgery would probably kill her rather than cure her. My father died just a few short years after his beloved dog passed away. There’s a symmetry at play in this outcome. I think the messages from Fate are clear.
As my myriad of unfortunate health conditions leave me in more and more pain with each passing day, the weight of years is pressing on my soul. Better to look forward to the next great adventure than to suffer overlong in the last act of this mortal production of a play by the great poet in the sky. The final curtain will close and the concluding overture has its last beautiful notes. Perhaps a celestial swan will sing it.
But I am not depressed and maudlin. I have lived a good life. And not all the good things in it are now only available in memories. Not while I can still draw and tell a story. I am slowing down in every way, but there are still stories in me.
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Drawing Nudists
Drawing people with no clothes on is something I actually learned to do in college. Even more ironic is the fact that I was still suffering a nude-o-phobia at the time due to being traumatized by a sexual assault at age ten that had been a repressed memory until the year before I took the anatomy drawing class with live nude models. It was not a class full of guys since you had to have made high grades in three previous levels of drawing classes. There were only three other males in the class, and none of them were significantly more secure in their own nakedness than I was. Virgins all. (What do you expect from male art majors?) But it began my journey into drawing nudes and eventually becoming a nudist.
Drawing a nude figure in a work of art, whether by painting, drawing with a pencil, colored pencils, or digital art on a computer, is an essential step to creating believable figures even after you put clothing on them. Anatomical correctness in structure and proportions are far more realistic when originally drawn by your practiced hand as a nude figure. My mother noted when watching me paint that the pencil drawing underneath looked like a naked body until clothed by a rendering of a body covering, even if I was working from a model or photo that was fully clothed. Being a modest Methodist she often asked if I intended to draw clothes on before painting, which I usually did… especially on pictures painted at home where she would see.
When I am intentionally drawing a nudist picture, I will depict an activity that I enjoy doing in the nude myself. The figure, a male figure, represents me. I do tend to depict myself as an innocent child rather than a fat old man with a beard. I also draw nude girls, usually in the age of innocence, because I don’t have any reason to do porn. And drawing nudes helps me immensely with my own positive body image problem.
Pictures of nudists do not need to reveal sexual features. I don’t particularly enjoy drawing genitals. And the idea of the picture usually does not require those things to be in the picture.
Sometimes the theme of the picture is intended to be humorous. Streaking back in the 1970s always got a lot of laughs, as well as evil looks from old church ladies.
Fairy nudity is also usually given a pass. Why would tiny magical creatures really need clothes?
Some pictures evoke memories of camping, Something we did as a family every summer in the 60s and 70s, though never in the nude… except in my imagination.
And of course, some pictures need to exist simply because the human body is inherently beautiful.
All of this is talked about in the essay I wrote about it in book form on Amazon. It goes into much greater detail with many more illustrations.
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Out of One Comes Many
This colored-pencil drawing of a warrior gnome was an old work of art that I chose to put in my digital sketchbook for a serious update, I redrew it digitally. Doing it digitally is so easy I did not have to be satisfied with only one version of the update.
So, here she is wearing a rogue’s hat and armor that is definitely more metallic.
Here the hat becomes a metal helmet. The gauntlets and cape are improved, and her magic wand is now a short sword for defensive strokes.
And here is the one where I get too carried away. I liked the cute face in this version, but the AI Mirror tool glitched like an AI program will and shifted the short sword to the wrong arm on the elbow. Instead of correcting it, I gave up at this point. Either of the first two are fine for my purposes.
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Nerd Class
Back in the 1980’s I was given the gift of teaching the Chapter I program students in English. This was done because Mrs. Soulwhipple was not only a veteran English teacher, but also the superintendent’s wife. She was the one gifted with all the star kids, the A & B students, the ones that would be identified as the proper kids to put into our nascent Gifted and Talented Program. That meant that I would get all the kids that were C, D, & F in most of their classes, the losers, the Special Edwards, the learning disabled, the hyper rocketeers of classroom comedy, and the trouble makers. And I was given this gift because, not only was I not a principal’s or superintendent’s wife, but I actually learned how to do it and became good at it. How did I do that, you might ask? I cheated. I snooped into the Gifted and Talented teacher training, learned how to differentiate instruction for the super-nerd brain, and then used the stolen information to write curriculum and design activities for all my little deadheads (and they didn’t even know who the Grateful Dead were, so that’s obviously not what I meant). I treated the little buggers like they were all GT students. Voila! If you tell a kid they are talented, smart, and worthy of accelerated instruction… the little fools believe it, and that is what they become.
Even the goofy teacher is capable of believing the opposite of what is obvious and starts treating them like super-nerds because he actually believes it. I soon had kids that couldn’t read, but were proud of their abstract problem-solving skills. I had kids that could enhance the learning of others with their drawing skills, their singing ability, and their sense of what is right and what is wrong. I had them doing things that made them not only better students for me, but in all their classes. And I did not keep the methods to my madness a secret, either. I got so good at coercing other teachers to try new ideas and methods that I got roped into presenting some of the in-service training that all Texas teachers are required by law to do. And unlike so many other boring sessions we all sat through, I presented things I was doing in the actual classroom that other teachers could also use with success. The other teachers tried my activities and sometimes made them work better than I did.
Yes, I know this all sounds like bragging. And I guess it probably is. But it worked. My kids kept getting better on the standardized tests and the State tests that Texas education loves so much. And Mrs. Soulwhipple was still the superintendent’s wife, but she did not stay a teacher forever. She eventually went to a new school district with her husband. And guess who they started thinking of when the question of who would be the next teacher for the nerd classes was considered. That’s right, little ol’ Reluctant Rabbit… that goofy man who drew pictures on the board and made kids read like a reading-fiend… me.
So, a new era began in Cotulla. In addition to still getting to teach all the deadheads (because they weren’t going to trust those precious children to anyone else, naturally), I began teaching at least one edition of Mr. B’s famous Nerd Class every school year. We actually assigned long novels and great pieces of literature for the kids to read and discuss and study in depth. Novels like To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt were read. We began talking about “big ideas”, “connections to the wider world”, and how “things always change”. We began taking on ideas like making our world better and how to help our community. Kids began to think they were learning things that were important. We did special units on Exploring Our Solar System, The World of Mark Twain, Finding the Titanic, and The Tragedy of Native American History. And we spent as much as a third of the year on each. I am myself cursed with a high IQ and a very disturbing amount of intelligence. I am the deepest living stockpile of useless facts and trivia that most of my students would ever meet in their lifetimes. And even I was challenged by some of the learning we took on. That’s the kind of thing that makes a teaching career fun. It kept me teaching and meeting new students and new challenges long after my health issues made it a little less than sensible to keep going. And if I manage to tell you a few Nerd Class stories in the near future, then at least you stand a chance of knowing a little bit about what-the-heck I am talking about. So be prepared for the worst. I am retired now, and have plenty of time for long-winded stories about being a teacher.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, teaching, Uncategorized
The Latest From the Mickey Files
Here’s a new picture just created today.
Another new picture of Susu, my imaginary granddaughter.
My newest book, was published yesterday.
My most popular book over the last two months has two five-star ratings in the short time it has been published.
I may be slowing down in writing and creating, but I am picking up speed in getting noticed, read, and liked.
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Catch a Falling Star 