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Mickey the Poet

Mickey is doing Mickey stuff again. Today, his first book of poetry. It is now available in e-book form from Amazon. Book number 24.

I have to admit, I have never seen myself as a poet… at least, not a competent poet. But it feels empowering to put key ideas from your life as a teacher down in a book in verse form. I feel almost as confident as the poets I admire, Robert Browning, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and all…

But as I really seem to be gradually crumbling into the dust of the deceased, I am aware this could well be my final publication. Words are coming harder. The jokes are not as funny. And Irony creeps into the realm of graveyard humor.

So, now I am a published poet. Probably the worst one you could ever find. But capable of pithy poesy and straight-on wordsmithery. the link. Enjoy the loony lyric verse. See how evil this poetry really is.

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Conundrums

More and more it feels like my digital drawings are turning out cross-eyed girls. I look at this portrait of the Black Child of Quaran, and though I know she’s focusing straight ahead, the more it seems her eyes have gone medically wrong and crossed… a neural disorder.

This is the original picture in colored pencil that I made the digital copy from. I put this picture on the digital drawing board by uploading it. Then I put a layer on top of it and began tracing the original with my digital stylus using both the pen and brush settings. Of course, arthritis in my fingers messes that all up, making bizarre quirks in the picture that I must repeatedly erase and redraw.. So, I edited the picture with my AI Mirror app and rearranged the lines to conform to a realistic anime style. That widens the eyes and shrinks the nose, making changes to my drawing of up to fifty percent.

Here’s an intermediate step in the creation of a digital drawing completely from scratch, not tracing anything. It started from mere blobs of color in human shapes that I manipulated for a couple of hours. You can see I have not put in a background yet or added clothing. And the girl on the right is totally cross-eyed..

Here’s a variation of the same picture that I worked on for another hour trying to cure the crossed eyes. Better, but still a problem. One of my high school friends from Iowa pointed out the cross-eyed problem in drawings I had posted on Facebook. He suggested it was using the AI app that caused it. I experimented. And he was right. The inner parts of the eye, closest to the nose, will have the white parts shrunken or eliminated when the AI makes the eyes larger than the drawing I used it on.

I discovered the key to fighting that problem was to exaggerate myself, making the whites of the eyes larger so that they would appear more normal when the AI did its fifty percent thing and shrunk them.

You can see here the difference the exaggerations made when I edited the previous picture using the AI tool on the eyes and face.

But sometimes I sort of fall in love with the cross-eyed princess and decide to leave her that way. She’s kinda quirky and cute like that. And I don’t like feeling that the hours of work were wasted.

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In the Winking of the Eye

The Angel with her Puppy… this was made from a puzzle picture I finished on the Tap Color App. It is basically a redrawing of the puzzle picture in a more cartoonish anime style. Using digital tools I didn’t have to be satisfied with a straight-up copy of the original picture.

The Angel with her Puppy 2… I made some big changes. I used photo-shopping tools to copy a more realistic face onto the angel. I also gave her bare legs, something I like to draw, especially on children with their soft and subtle shadowing. The dog was fun to draw too in both pictures. The angel wings were in the way of drawing the dog, so I put them on the girl’s headdress instead, making her a little more human.

A Sylvan Tea Party in the Butterfly Bedroom... This one is harder to explain. I wanted to picture naked innocence between a male faun and a female fairy. I was even going to put fairy wings on the dog. But I finished the nude figures in ways I wanted to preserve, so I didn’t put horns on the faun or wings on the fairy and her dog. Those things may come later. I have about seven versions of this picture, and am not yer satisfied with any of them.

Ashlynn and the Blue Wall… I decided to daydream while drawing a little less here and just do a portrait of the girl from Instagram.

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More Digital Art Practice

Yes, I know her manic smile looks somewhat crazed. But in the photo she shared with me, she was perfectly cute and pleasant. I didn’t realize I overdid the expression until I posted it the last time.

This girl was also sweet and pretty. I messed up the eyes in the first version of this picture, making her look cockeyed. I worked hard to fix that.

This is the same girl as in the picture directly above. Different dress, a different pose, a different day, and I got this one right the first time.

She’s a teenage swimsuit model, and in my opinion, a future supermodel.

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More Pictures Because I Can’t Stop It

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Potential Paffooneys Fresh from the Factory

This bumble bee portrait was made from a background taken from a puzzle I put together and a digitally hand-drawn bumble bee.

This is a picture done from an anonymous post on Instagram of a solemn-faced girl.

This was done from a picture of a girl modeling for a catalog. The clothes had a pattern on them that frustrated me, so I turned the clothing white.

This is a digital re-drawing of a picture I did in colored pencil of Blueberry Bates and Mike Murphy.

This is, I think, a girl. Maybe the same girl as picture number 2 above. She’s a cutie and the photo looks like the face of the other picture more than my drawing does.

So, there’s some potential Paffooneys to tell stories about in future posts.

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Once in a Lifetime

This is a photo taken with my cell phone from the Carrollton Greenbelt Park in the Dallas suburbs. It shows the moment at 1:42 pm on April 8th, 2024 when the eclipse of the sun became total. It is the first time in my life that I have seen it with my own eyes (assisted by eclipse lenses purchased at Walmart). I and my daughter watched it in the park. My wife watched it with her class at her middle school. It was a magical moment that we will probably never have the chance to see again.

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Valerie Clarke Stories

Of all the lead characters in stories I have created, I think Valerie Clarke is the most important. She is really the first creation I ever crafted that seemed to step off the pages and come to life. I have already lost count of the number of times she has appeared in one of my stories, both the published ones and the ones still being written. She is a character who has loved and lost.

This story is an example of that;

The second book I am going to offer a link to is more like an origin story. It is not the first story I published with Valerie in it, but it is the story where Val is the youngest I have yet to portray her.

This is a better illustration of her than the first Paffooney attached to this post. Val has blue eyes. Sasha, the real-life former student I based the character on, is the one who had brown eyes.

Snow Babies is the book that I consider my masterwork, the best thing I have ever written. There are several main characters in this sprawling story, but Valerie is probably the most important among them. It is a group survival story about a killer blizzard in a small Iowa town.

I don’t expect you to read all of these books. But I certainly won’t mind if you do. You will see how the character grows and develops in these three stories. The chronological order is, first, The Captain Came Calling. Second is Snow Babies. And Sing Sad Songs is third.

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Standing in Judgement

Yep. She disapproves. Not of my drawing practice. Especially not when I draw her. But posting a portrait of a nudist who is nude? Well, a pretty one, admittedly. But… Oh well, I am used to objections.

She was part of an ad for a nudist resort. I changed her enough so she’s not really recognizable because I don’t have any names to give credit to or get permission from. She’s a girl by a pool, the way Maxfield Parrish always talked about painting a “girl on a rock.” Susu isn’t opposed to naked people. She is just opposed to me making a picture like this. She’s acting as my conscience.

Susu would just like me to make more pictures like this, a cartoon reimagining of Susu’s grandma and Uncle Henry.

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Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)

This link will help you understand Synesthesia

Francois spotlight

Yes, Mondays are blue.  Specifically French blue.  Every day of the week has its own color.  Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre,  Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue.  I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints.  I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head.  I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world.  I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name.  It is called synesthesia.

Image

It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”.  When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence.  I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns.  Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns.  It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color.  Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word.  But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue.  It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”.  And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.

sunnyface2

Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.

I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do.  I certainly was.  I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue.  My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing.  I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word.  I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there.  But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true.   The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded.  I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls.  My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters.  She is left handed and also gifted at drawing.  I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.

Creativity

Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.

Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about.  But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about.  And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases.  It is not a bad condition to have.  In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing.  I could use some good for a change.  Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway.  (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).

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