Catch a Falling Star

This is the finger-painted scribble doodle I started this art project with. I routinely start a digital art piece in this way, making either a fast face-like form with a scribbled outline and an application of brush strokes of basic color patterns with my fingers on the touch screen of my phone or an outline done on the layer above a photograph that I fill with color before removing the photo from underneath.

Then I push and pull and erase and add with my electronic stylus to fill in the details. This picture of the face in progress reveals what often happens when you have an arthritic finger. I slipped in working on the teeth. With pen and ink and colored pencils, the drawing would be ruined at this point. But digitally I can easily fix it.

This is the fancy little device I bought on Amazon to use on a touchscreen phone. It is electronic and clickable.

Here’s what it looks like after fifteen minutes worth of fixing.

So, I made this into a science-fiction girl. I think it looks good for a scribble-doodle.

So, I am obsessively thinking about the granddaughter I do not have and may never have. My child was lucky not to have the problem that cost a possible granddaughter at the wrong time. It happened, tragedy though it was before the Supreme Court struck down Roe vs. Wade and would’ve put another life in danger too. But life and the world we live in can be cruel. The consequence may well be no grandchild ever. That kind of problem is serious.

But here I have made another picture of Susu, the imaginary granddaughter I talk to constantly. She is drawn from a model on TikTok that I thought bore a resemblance to both of the parents that might have been. Fortunately, she posts lots of singing and dancing pictures on both TikTok and Instagram. This girl doesn’t know she’s been posing for me. But clearly, I cannot make portraits that look like the model anyway. Without help, you will never Identify who this girl really is. And suing me for using her as a model won’t make any money for anybody since I have none.

“But, Grandpa. I already gave you my permission.”

“Susu, you are not real and only live in my imagination.”

“Oh, but you are a very good Grandpa and I love you.”

“Well, I love you too. Even though I know you are not real.”

Can you tell who it is that I am trying to draw a picture of? I’ll give you a hint… movie star who also dances. Not Ray Bolger, not Tom Holland, not Hugh Jackman… but may have been a costar with two of those three. Guesses will be answered in the comments. If no one knows, my apology for bad portraiture will be found there.

I have been drawing a plethora of pictures on my cell phone using the apps cited above, an electronic stylus, and every editing feature the phone’s gallery and Google Photos can provide me. My arthritic hands are making the pencil and pen methods I have used forever far too time-consuming and permanently flub-filled. And I am trying to do as much art as possible before the end of everything which I increasingly fear is coming for me soon.

I am not using the new AI art stuff the way others are using it. I am not telling the AI to make a picture for me according to my written description. I can’t do artwork with that little control. What I do actually undertake is the redrawing of many of the pictures I have already done in pen and ink and colored pencil. I retrace the work the best I can. Mistakes can be undone with one click. I redo the colors, shading, and details using the functions of the drawing app. In the end, I use the AI Mirror to edit it, blending the colors better than my color-blind eyes can manage unaided and giving it that anime/manga style that is recognizably different than my original style.

Digitally redone. I let the AI have its way with the contents of the quilt box since the AI couldn’t figure out the structure of a crazy quilt. It decided that the things in the box were fancy gift boxes with an unreadable brand name. (The AI will not risk violating any real trademark or logo.)

I admit to being overly obsessed with drawing girls and girls’ faces… and maybe belly buttons. But I am a lonely old man spending lots of time in bed doing little but waiting for death to find me. The Grim Reaper is still trying to beat me at chess. I thought he would win with game with Covid’s help in 2020. The heat was probably going to be the death of me this last summer, but Grimmy couldn’t figure out how to attack the King’s Indian Defense I learned from Bobby Fischer in an article in Boy’s Life magazine in the early 70s.

Ask yourself, “Why does anybody want to be a writer?”

It is not an easy thing to answer. Writing is hard. It tears at the edges of your mind until it leaves sores, infections, and permanent damage. Well, those of us who rewrite ourselves because of childhood trauma suffer from that anyway. And every horror and gut-twister and tear-jerker that you have written about haunts you again with every reread, proofread, secondary reread, and final edit. Unless, somehow, you don’t do those steps and it turns up real writing instead of horse-turd fertilizer by some minor but repeatable miracle. There are writers like that. They write about sparkly vampires and Mr. Gray’s sex dungeon.

I’m one of those writers who spuriously claims that I write because I have to. And that is not right either, I write because I HAVE TO!!! (IN ALL CAPS AND 3 EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!)

As a lifelong avid reader, I have read so many other people’s lives… so many other people’s stories, that I have lived a thousand lives and learned so much from each that it is my duty to put pencil and paper together to tell the tales that only I can write… or draw pictures of.

I am the man from the setting sun. I come from the future to deliver the past. -by Mickey

Whatever the hell that means, I have to say it. My writing may never get really read and understood because the world may come to an end too soon for anything I write to ever endure. And yet, the key to everything… to the survival of the human species… of life on Earth… may be buried somewhere in one of my ridiculous books. I may be the one to give ultimate meaning to everything that is or ever was on this little blue marble in the middle of all time and all space. Or maybe in one of the ridiculous plays by the man (whoever he really was) who wrote the works of William Shakespeare. It doesn’t matter who really wrote it. That key is out there somewhere. And it changes everything if found and understood.

So, the reasons I must write have to do with the philosophical horse-doo-doo that the Existentialists taught us. That nothing means anything… until we give it meaning. Even this sentence I write here and now means nothing unless I give it meaning. This is what we need writers for. To make everything mean something. It is a sacred duty.

I must make you laugh a little, cry a little, and feel a lot of fundamental things. And you must do that too if you are meant to be a writer. Believe me, it is the only gift God gives a man that is also a lifelong curse.