Ariel is actually a three-foot-tall plastic doll, fully articulated, but restored after an unknown number of years of hard use. Unlike the porcelain dolls my mother made in a kiln, this one has actually been played with and shows wear and tear even after being restored with new pieces of skin, paint, and glue. The wig, eyelashes, and pajamas are all newly applied. I have promised her that she will be better cared for in her retirement from being played with. The thing is, though, photos of her are perfect for use as digital art practice.
This is the photo I used to draw the picture above it. You can see I figured out how to avoid copyrighted characters on the pajamas in the final product, in case anybody ever offers me money for such a picture.
Here’s another view of the face with that mysterious almost-smile captured to the best of my ability.
Here is another view of Ariel being sleepy, but with big blue eyes.
She can easily have a sad face, too. It only takes a few subtle tweaks.
Yep, I read about being an “erronort” traveling in a balloon while sitting in a parking lot in my car.
Believe it or not, I read this entire 100+year-old book in my car while waiting for my daughter and my son in school parking lots. What a perfectly ironic way to read a soaring imaginary adventure written by Mark Twain and mostly forgotten about by the American reading public.
My copy of this old book is a 1965 edition published for school libraries of a book written in 1894. It tells the story of how Tom and Huck and Jim steal a ride on a balloon at a town fair from a somewhat mentally unhinged professor of aeronautical science. The balloon, which has space-age travel capabilities due to the professor’s insane genius, takes them on an accidental voyage to Africa.
Of course, the insane professor intends to kill them all, because that’s what insane geniuses do after they prove how genius-y they really are. But as he tries to throw Tom into the Atlantic, he only manages to plunge himself through the sky and down to an unseen fate. The result being a great adventure for the three friends in the sands of the Sahara. They face man-eating lions, mummy-making sandstorms, and a chance to land on the head of the Sphinx.
The entire purpose of this book is to demonstrate Twain’s ability to be a satirical stretcher of the truth, telling jokes and lies through the unreliable narrator’s voice of Huck Finn.
Here is a quoted passage from the book to fill up this review with words and maybe explain just a bit what Twain is really doing with this book;
Notice how I doubled my word count there without typing any of the words myself? Isn’t the modern age wonderful?
But there you have it. This book is about escaping every-day newspaper worries. In a time of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, global warming, and renewed threats of thermonuclear boo-boos with Russia, this proved to be the perfect book to float away with on an imaginary balloon to Africa. And the book ends in a flash when Aunt Polly back in Hannibal wants Tom back in time for breakfast. I really needed to read this book when I picked it up to read it.
I am worried about many things right now. I am finishing up an autobiographical book of artworks depicting the many different kinds of nudes I have drawn over the past fifty years. Some are updated to look almost real with AI Mirror assistance and editing with my touchscreen phone and electronic stylus. It is a book that is not pornographic but shows both male and female full-frontal nudity. It is a risky time to publish a book like that with the general book-banning fury going on in Texas, Florida, and other Bible-thumping Inquisitions going on in MAGA-conservative hotbeds.
The news from my KDP author’s dashboard has been surprising for the last two weeks. A couple of people at least have chosen to read some of my books on Kindle Unlimited. It is not the way things have happened in the past where books were only being read one at a time separated by empty weeks. In the last two weeks, more than 1,200 pages have been read, sometimes with three different books being read the same day. Total coincidence? Probably.
As you can see, I’ve also been spending considerable time making pictures. I have been using digital tools mostly on my old colored-pencil art, but also on pictures collected from the internet over the years in my picture file. It is refreshing to be able to draw again without having to work around permanent splotches and flubs caused by arthritis in my hands.
I gave you fair warning. Pogo has been coming to Mickey’s Catch a Falling Star Blog for a while now. So, if you intended to avoid it, TOO BAD! You are here now in Okefenokee Swamp with Pogo and the gang, and subject to Mickey’s blog post about Walt Kelly and his creations.
Walt Kelly began his cartoon hall-of-fame career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios. If you watch the credits in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo, you will see Walt listed as an animator and Disney artist. In fact, he had almost as much influence on the Disney graphic style as Disney had on him. He resigned in 1941 to work at Dell Comics where he did projects like the Our Gang comics that you see Mickey smirking at here, the Uncle Wiggly comics, Raggedy Ann and Andy comics, and his very own creations like Pogo, which would go on to a life of its own in syndicated comics. He did not return to work at Disney, but always credited Disney with giving him the cartoon education he would need to reach the stratosphere.
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Walt Kelly’s Earth Day comic
Pogo is an alternate universe that is uniquely Walt Kelly’s own. It expresses a wry philosophy and satirical overview of our society that is desperately needed in this time of destructive conservative politics and deniers of science and good sense.
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Pogo himself is an every-man character that we are supposed to identify with the most. He is not the driver of plots and doings in the swamp, rather the victim and unfortunate experiencer of those unexpectable things. Life in Okefenokee is a long series of random events to make life mostly miserable but always interesting if approached with the right amount of Pogo-ism.
And Pogo was always filled with cute and cuddly as well as ridiculous.
As a boy, I depended on the comic section of the Sunday paper to make sense of the world for me. If I turned out slightly skewed and warped in certain ways, it is owing to the education I myself was given by Pogo, Lil Abner, Dagwood Bumstead, and all the other wizards from the Sunday funnies. There was, of course, probably no bigger influence on my art than the influence of Walt Kelly.
So what more can I say about Walt Kelly? I haven’t yet reached the daily goal of 500 words. And yet, the best way to conclude is to let Walt speak for himself through the beautiful art of Pogo.
So, October is a spooky month, for Halloween reasons… And I bought a 14-inch doll’s skeletal remains in a local store. I decided to use this particular photo to make some creepy experimental stuff.
The fairy posing for me in the original photo began complaining as I operated on the image with both my computer stylus and my AI editing program called AI Mirror.
I thought maybe this was a little better. It still made Melodyhopper the Butterfly Child cry fairy tears.
Mel found this one better. “But it still makes me feel like Frankenstein’s Monster,” she said with a tear still in her eye. “Well, I like how it makes me look funny,” said Red Skeleton.
So, I finally settled on another portrait of my imaginary granddaughter, Susu.
So, I decided to update my portrait of Red Skelton from colored pencil to digital. Before I finished I happened to notice my Amazon sales report for October. One day old and a large number of pages read from about four different books. And all last week I had at least two somebodies reading from three different books every day. I apparently sold one e-book and had over a thousand pages read in a week for the first time ever on Kindle Unlimited. Has something suddenly broken my way? Or is the world still irredeemably broken?
Okay, the first one is more like him since it is more cross-eyed. I can goof up even in digital.
I don’t usually do portraits, but, as I believe I may have said on an older post, Red Skelton is like a god to me. Much of what I know about comedy, I learned from him back in the 60’s and early 70’s. I watched him religiously on Wednesday nights on both CBS and NBC (channels 5 from Mason City, Iowa, and 13 from Des Moines). He made me laugh. Sometimes he even made me cry. So I honor him now with a portrait (or insult him, depending on your opinion of my artwork) in a Paffooney of Red as Clem Kadiddlehopper, pride (or maybe village idiot) of Cornpone County, Tennessee.
Children are a resource that we, as a people, cannot live on without.
If we stop having children, nurturing children, raising children, providing children discipline and education, entertaining children, guiding children, and, most of all, loving children, in eighty or so years, human beings will be extinct in this universe.
How many universes are there with humanity being extinct in them? It is impossible to answer. But if there is more than one universe, there is more than one.
When I was a child myself, family farms were still the rule in Iowa. Couples would try for lots of kids to help with the farm work. Chores! I fed animals. I went with my grandfather to the feed store, the hardware store, and the hatchery. I drove a tractor. I walked bean fields and pulled weeds. I mucked out a hog house once (and believe me, once is enough for a lifetime.) I have slopped hogs. I shingled a house and a garage. I painted the family house (in town, not Grandpa’s farmhouse.) As a child, I helped my uncles who were farmers, and worked for other farmers in the area. I was just as important as fertilizer to the maintenance of the world I lived in. (I did not say I was important to USE AS fertilizer. They would’ve had to kill me to use me that way. But my work was a part of what made the land yield plenty.)
I was left, as a child, with the distinct impression that we were meant to live in the land as a part of the land. Nature was our friend. We didn’t cut down all the trees and pave over everything like the city folks did. The kid who never went skinny dipping was rare indeed.
There once were people who knew they lived with the land, and they were good stewards of the land. They knew if the land was not living well and healthy, then neither would they live well and healthy.
But I am not arguing that we should go back to the world of the 1960s. The work I did in the land back then is now mostly mechanized and done by machines, computers, automation, and factorization. But we can teach our precious children the values of old to use in new ways. If we don’t, well… I hope the AI Terminator Robots of the future will have a happy life without us.
Catch a Falling Star 