Time for something thoughtful… and quiet.
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Portraits With Big Eyes
I have long been an artist addicted to large, luminous eyes. I have long been accused of drawing too much like I am a Japanese anime or manga artist. Point taken. I was first inspired to draw characters like the ones in Astroboy which I was addicted to in the 1960s.
I know the big eyes can be overdone. They make a character like Big-eyed Benny above look positively alien. E.T. phone home style of stuff. But they can also be extra expressive. And many child faces do indeed have eyes that are more like a doe deer than a human. These lend a vulnerable quality of open-faced cuteness, an endearing quality that activates parental instincts.
And, some of these drawings that I do, portraits made from faces in the Walmart catalog or from Instagram, are actually started with a tracing layer laid atop the photograph. Here the eyes may have been exaggerated a little because I can’t help myself, but they are basically the same as the subject of the portrait. This girl does goofy comedy and dances on Instagram and has a really infectious grin that I can’t even begin to draw accurately.
But the result of this big-eyed obsession of mine all comes down to the fact that I have been retired from teaching now for an entire decade. I retired in 2014. And I miss working with kids. So much it hurts. Maybe I can’t make them laugh and learn anything anymore. But I can remember them as an artist. Drawing comes more from the heart than it does from the pen anyway.
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Exploring the Mind of Mickey
One really weird thing that teachers do is think about thinking. I mean, how can a person actually teach someone else how to think and how to learn if they don’t themselves understand the underlying processes? Now that I have retired from teaching and spend all my time feeling sorry for myself, I thought I would try thinking about thinking one more time at least. Hey, just because I am retired, it doesn’t mean I can’t still do some of the weird things I used to do as a teacher, right?
This time I made a map to aid me in my quest to follow the twists and turns of how Mickey thinks and how Mickey learns. Don’t worry, though. I didn’t actually cut Mickey’s head in half to be able to make this map. I used the magical tool of imagination. Some folks might call it story-telling… or bald-face lying.
Now, a brain surgeon would be concerned that my brain maps out in boxes. He would identify it as a seriously deformed brain. It is not supposed to be all rectangular spaces and stairs. It probably indicates a severe medical need for corrective surgery… or possibly complete amputation. But we are not going to concern ourselves with trying to save Mickey from himself right now. That is far too complex a topic to tackle in a 500-word daily post. We are just discussing the basics of operation.
You see the three little guys in the control room? They are an indication that not only did I steal an idea from the Disney/Pixar Movie Inside Out, but I apparently have too few guys doing the job up there compared to the movie version. (It probably makes sense though that a young girl like the one in the movie has a much more sensible configuration in her brain than someone who was a middle school teacher for 24 years. Seriously, that job can do a bit of damage.) The three little guys are not actually Moe, Curly, and Larry, though that wouldn’t be far from descriptive accuracy. They are Impulsive Ignatz, currently in the driver’s seat (or else I wouldn’t be writing this), Proper Percy the Planner, and Pompositous Felixian Checkerbob, the fact-checker and perfectionist (also labeled the inner nerd… I am told not everyone has one of these). They are the three little guys that run around in frantic circles in my head trying to deal with a constant flow of input and output, trying to make sense of everything, and routinely failing miserably.
I shouldn’t forget the other two little guys in my head, Sleepytime Tim in the Dream Center, and little Batty up in the attic. I have no earthly idea how either of them function, or what in the heck they are supposed to do. But there they are. The other three run up and down stairs all day, locating magic mushrooms and random knowledge in the many file cabinets, record collections, book stacks, and odd greasy containers that are stored all around in the many nooks and crannies of Mickey’s mind. They collect stuff through the eyes and ears, and it is also their responsibility to chuck things out through the stupidity broadcaster at various inopportune times. It is also a good idea for them to avoid the lizard brain of the limbic system in the basement. It is easily angered and might eat them.
So now you should be able to fully understand how Mickey thinks. (Or not… a qualifier I was forced to put in by Checkerbob.)
Filed under humor, insight, mental health, Paffooney, Uncategorized
At the Beach in My Imagination
It is cold and wet here in Texas. It makes me go somewhere else in my mind. I choose a beach in the cooler parts of Summer. A nude beach like the UFO Beach at South Padre Island.
It is interesting with digital art tools how you can make more than one picture with the various layers you create to make a digital artwork.
While it is a nude beach in my imagination, I really like this swimsuit I created… and it is an underaged girl I am drawing. You can never be too careful.
The crying boy who was the goal of my many-layered picture is crying because the story I wrote today breaks my heart to tell. It was not only at the nude beach but was about families who lost a family member in a school shooting. The incident in the story is fictional, but the story was inspired by the Uvalde tragedy. I have to cry one more time. Sorry about that.
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Digital Depictions of Cute Mini-Divas
There are a number of young, little dancing girls on Instagram and TikTok. And I have been daily practicing my digital art skills as I try to draw as much as possible before my arthritis takes my ability to draw away from me. What better thing to draw?
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Living a Naked Life
I was born in a blizzard many years ago,
A fact that does not make a nudist, you know,
But I wasn’t born with clothes on, a fact that is clear,
So, the fight of my life has been a thing that I fear.
For when you are naked and wearing no clothes,
The world can attack you, to danger exposed.
No armor gives you safety or turns away stabs.
And nothing protects you from wicked Life’s jabs.
The world can now see you with its angry-eyed glare,
And no secrets will keep you from judgments unfair.
I was born in a blizzard and now I am old
But now when I’m naked I’m not immune to the cold.
But I have seen people who love to be naked,
And smiles on bare faces are never quite faked.
They face life and nature without any clothes
And even are claiming they feel not exposed.
And I would live that way without any fears,
And I have missed out on many nude years,
Hiding and abiding in closets with tears,
Is not who I will be as the Grim Reaper nears.
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Wise Guy
At school today the principal asked us to come up with one word that we wanted to apply to our own lives as teachers. You know how the teaching game is. You start a new semester; you have to be subjected to eight hours of blah-blah-blah. It is required blah-blah-blah mandated by Texas education laws. My magic word was wisdom.
So, what does wisdom imply? Well, I am old. I should have some of that thing in one pocket or another. So I search my pockets. As a kid I vowed to become a wizard. What is a wizard if not a wise man? A wise guy. How, then, do you acquire wisdom?
In the movie Mystery Men, Ben Stiller tells us that mystical wisdom from the wise guy mystical sage is only saying a thing is its opposite. Thus true wisdom comes from learning how foolish you really are. It’s a good joke, but it’s also true. You can’t be wise unless you realize how little you actually know out of all the things that there are.
Why would I want to be wise? Well, I have the fool thing down pretty well already. As fools go, I’m a humble fool who trades in foolishness and calls it humor and young adult novels. So it follows, by logic, an advanced form of foolishness, that I must be wise.
Okay, wise guy, time to say something wise in the conclusion… Doh!
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Metaphor and Meaning
In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall. Why have I done such a foolish thing? Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head? In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters? Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical. I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose. It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.
Here is a secret to powerful writing. Connect ideas with metaphors. A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion. Sorry, I’m an English teacher. It’s in my genes. But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.
Let me show you a metaphor. Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;
The Cookie
Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…
With each bite I had less and less cookie left.
But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…
Lingered on… as memory.
The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life. I am getting older. I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening. I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately. So what is the point of the poem? That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me. Not my memory. The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me. That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.
Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair. Its innards are revealed and labeled. The beauty is gone. It’s kinda icky.
What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own. The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained. Let me try again;
The Boy and the Boat
The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.
“Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”
I can hear what you are thinking. “That’s too simple and ordinary. If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.” Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.
Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do. When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me. I told no one. I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two. In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall. To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened. I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer. It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching. Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again. Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?
Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning. So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one. You can make of it whatever you will;
The Grin
The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man
Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti
In the afternoon sun.
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New Art for a New Year
What are the chances that this is a class picture from a private school for young witches? I wouldn’t bet money on it, but I think they might eat my heart if I tried to teach there. (Ironic Humor Spells Class, of course.)
I sometimes think I use smiling faces too much in my digital art practices, so I made this Winter Portrait to cure that. I bet you couldn’t tell that this was supposed to be Emma Watson.
This is a redrawing of an old colored-pencil picture. The Native American boy is standing in front of a mesa-lined sunset.
The original picture.
The big-eyed boy goes to school. Notice the poorly tied tie. He’s a bit nervous of starting middle school as a tiny sixth grader. Such is the nature of my holiday artwork.
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Why Babysitters Hate My House (A Surrealist Comic that’s only slightly True)
Okay, I know it’s creepy. I know it is only a little bit funny. But I like to think it’s good colored pencil work, and it does seem to stand up well over time even though it was created back in 1980. I wrote this hoping to break into the cartoonist world in the 1980’s. I only managed to get rejection letters and form letters back then. Big dreams and no real breaks. But if you are goofy long enough and cartoon up a storm with enough lightning and hailstones in it, somebody will invent the internet (Thanks, AL Gore) and digital photography and WordPress Blogging so I can share it all with you.
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