Born on January 23rd, 1939 Greg and Tim Hildebrandt were twin brothers who both had considerable painting skills. Much like Mickey claims to be, they originally wanted to be Disney animators, but, failing that, decided on a professional art career strongly influenced by Disney, Norman Rockwell, and Maxfield Parrish. They both turned pro in 1959 and began painting fantasy art in oil, working on projects together.
Their styles were very similar.
The picture above is done by Tim without help from Greg.This Lord of the Rings painting of Eowyn and the Nazgul was a solo effort by Greg.
This illustration for Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara series was a collaboration, showing how seamlessly the brothers worked together.
Their first truly big break came with the popularity in the 1970’s of their Lord of the Rings Calendars.
And then, of course, in 1977 they were asked by 20th Century Fox to rework the poster concept done by Tom Jung for the movie Star Wars. It was done on a very tight schedule with the brothers working in shifts to complete it in only 36 hours. It resulted in the well-known image that began this post.
Here follows a few more of my favorite works of the Brothers Hildebrandt.
This one by Greg Hildebrandt was my favorite poster in college.
Pinocchio and the Blue Fairy
The Mad Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland
Islands in the Sky 1999
Sadly, Tim passed away in 2006 at the age of 67. But here you see Greg still painting at age 82,
I am having trouble with my eyes. Glaucoma. So I really want everything to be BIGGER.
And I try to avoid what I can’t really see.
My hands hurt too much to draw as much as my heart wants. So, I reuse a lot of old pictures that I love because I used to be pretty good at drawing.
Because I am old now, I can only seem to think about and fixate on a thing I can no longer do. And not just because Raquel Welch is now dead. The little soldier can no longer even stand up and salute a beautiful woman. And carrying out his essential duty is out of the question. I even make metaphors like a dirty old man now.
Dang it!
And I do not have a shortage of ideas to use. I had intended to write a biographical story about Walt Whitman being not only a poet, but the nudist kind of naturist according to his poetry. But diabetes assaults my thinking machine and putting together complicated themes and ideas becomes too hard to manage in the time I have available.
Of course, I am retired and have nothing but time available. But with all the other issues, I forget to use it before it is too late.
So, I wrote this… some of it large enough to actually see it.
I have always cherished science fiction. Not just Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Not just Star Trek and Star Wars. But all of it. Buck Rodgers, Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, Galaxy Quest, Mars Attacks, and E.T.
Space is important to me. I feel like all of mankind will be a failure as a species if they don’t start moving out amongst the stars.
It’s not just that I am ensorcelled by the magical adventures that space-travel stories mixed with a romantic view of facing existential danger with a smile and a ray-gun can provide.
I watched with wide 12-year-old eyes when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon for the very first time.
That was all the way back in 1969!
I am disappointed that my George-Jetson expectations of life in 2023 have not even remotely been met.
Sure, computers are great. But where are the flying cars? The fishbowl helmets for walking on the Moon? Personal jetpacks to get to school and back?
It isn’t the dreamers, it’s the doers that have let me down.
And I know we could well run the risk of meeting something out there that might want to eat us.
But are we truly alive anymore if we are afraid to risk death in the face of Space Exploration and Discovery? We are not immortal. We need to achieve things that outlast us to justify our existence.
So, come on, people! Let’s make the world over again and start building cities on Mars.
Let’s start building what we have dreamt of rather than hiding from what we fear!
Stan was at the toy store early the next day, fuming enough that he didn’t know why there wasn’t a trail of smoke coming out of each of his ears as he made his way through the unlocked business door.
“Geist! You need to explain some things!”
“Oh? Did you make the mistake of cutting open the paper skull?”
The owlish man blinked his magnified eyes and gave Stan a grim smile.
“No, I didn’t. But not because I believe any of that nonsense about demons and the Bones of the Lonelies.”
“Then why didn’t you do it?”
“Well, I need to know how it really works. I am not going to risk there being some poisonous chemical or radioactive substances in the workings of the thing.”
“I don’t know what is inside the thing. I do know the one that got opened in Colombia fifty years ago started a series of grisly killings that didn’t stop until at least five hundred people were dead.”
“I don’t want to hear more of the BS. I want to know how it really works. Somehow the thing can talk to me in my mind and Maria can’t hear it. And then it talks to her, and I can’t hear what it says. This is not the way the universe works. I want to know how the science works. And who programmed the damned thing.”
“Well, at least you understand that the thing is damned. I can’t tell you scientifically how the thing works. I do not know. There is science behind it somehow, but growing up I was a barn owl and lived in a tree.“
“What good are you to this place if you don’t know anything at all about how things work?”
“Has she asked it how to get her boyfriend back?”
“She was talking to it again when I left.”
“It will be guiding her, then, on how to get to the Bones of the Lonelies. It will require a sacrifice of her, possibly asking her to give up her life.”
“What? You mean it might kill her?”
“Oh, that is what most often happens in these scenarios. Is she guilty of any mortal sins?”
“She admitted that she brought Yesenia here so she could steal her boyfriend.”
“Yeah, that kind of betrayal probably requires the death penalty.”
“What? How could that happen?”
“Well, the skull opens a portal to the land of the dead. A spirit from the other side will come to the doorway used as a portal and take possession of the body. Considering where she would be going, to the Bones of the Lonelies, she will be taken nude to the other side, leaving some blood-spattered clothing, probably underwear, at the spot of the exchange. There she will relive an event in the life of a lonely one. And if the story she is reliving involves death, then the human body will become a sacrifice to the story, and she will die. Most of the bodies from this practice have decomposed completely in the present because they died so far in the past.”
Stan blanched. He had to get home to Maria and the skull to stop her before…
*****
When he got home, the door to Maria’s bedroom was wide open, which it never was in his prior experience of it. In fact, it was usually not only closed but locked.
Just inside the doorway was a discarded pair of pink panties. And there was blood.
It is a magic word for the Wizards in White to use, and failure to acquire it before you do what you do makes you an evil sorcerer without a soul. The word is consent.
con·sent
noun
permission for something to happen or agreement to do something. “no change may be made without the consent of all the partners” Similar: agreement, assent, concurrence, accord, permission, authorization, sanction, leave, clearance, acquiescence, acceptance, approval, seal of approval, stamp of approval. imprimatur, backing, endorsement, confirmation, support, favor, good wishes, go-ahead, thumbs up, green light, OK, approbation Opposite: dissent
verb
give permission for something to happen. “he consented to a search by a detective” Similar: agree, to assent, to allow, give permission for, sanction, accept
Hopefully, she is getting permission to draw the people she is putting in her pictures before sharing them with the world. If the person you are drawing is a real person, you have to have their consent to use their image. If I am drawing a real person, I am careful to get consent. Of course, if I am drawing out of my head, using one of those little wooden pose models, or just making it up straight out of my head, imaginary consent is pretty much superfluous. (Superfluous… a very good word. But you should look it up before you use it so that you use it correctly. Much as this article does with the word consent.)
Both of the characters in the cartoon are made up. The first lady, the pirate Zorah the Seawitch, is a re-interpretation of a George Perez comic-book character (being an altered image that looks like the original only in pose and proportions, it essentially becomes my own creation.)
The portrait at the left of Naomi, was made from a photograph given to me by the girl herself, asking me to draw her as I saw her. This was consent. I not only gave her the first original, she expressly knew that I have a blog where I have posted such pictures before.
Of course, Naomi herself told me it doesn’t look enough like her that her friends would recognize her without help. And she did not give me permission to reveal her actual name. I made the name Naomi up for the portrait, using one letter that is the same as the first letter of her last name, and I will not reveal which letter that is. Thus, I have a sort of consent for calling the portrait by the name I call it.
This young lady consented to her boyfriend about having this picture drawn before she consented to posing.
Being a naturist or nudist requires a good deal of knowledge about consent. If you carry a camera around on your phone in a nudist park or naturist club, you have to understand you don’t have consent to take pictures of anybody without express permission… or written permission if you are in any way planning to publish it or put it on the internet. You also don’t have permission to stand around and stare at other nudists, just as they don’t have automatic consent to stare at you. Or laugh at you, unless you give consent by laughing about yourself first.
But the thing that makes the word consent a powerful magic word, is when somebody realizes using a little bit of common sense (which is actually an oxymoron because sense is not common and what the common man believes is true is rarely good sense) that this word needs to be taught in sex education classes (another oxymoron because nobody can teach sex education anymore due to the fact that the average ox who votes for the school board members is a moron and never had sex education himself but has a religion that tells him that he should reject any attempts to make his kids smarter as loudly as possible.)
In my own case, as a victim of a sexual assault by an older boy at the age of ten, I did not know about consent. And neither did my attacker. I did not give any consent to having my testicles twisted at the same time I was forbidden to scream in pain. And because I did not give consent, it was a crime, even for someone who wasn’t yet legally an adult, like him. Neither of us knew that I could say no legally and he had to stop. I was too traumatized to let myself remember what he did to me for another twelve years so he got away with it completely. It would’ve helped if I had known a little bit about what he was doing to me and why. And what my rights were supposed to be. And it wouldn’t have hurt if somebody had told him that what he was doing was wrong.
Kids need to know at a really early age more than just about bees pollinating flowers and birds singing to attract a mate for some serious egg laying. They need to know about consent. And what people should not do without consent. Or even with consent if it is forced, coerced, achieved through trickery, or not valued in court because you were under-aged when he did what he did.
Teaching consent as a part of sex education is an important enough idea that I will need to come back to it again later.
My path in life has never been straight, never arrived at the destinations I was originally shooting for.
Sometimes you wake up and find a new path spreading out before you.
My dreams were once to go to the Air Force Academy and learn to fly planes.
But bad arches in my feet, poor eyesight in my left eye, and nagging difficulties with allergies turned that dream on its head. I was physically ground-bound, and able to fly only in my dreams.
And then I went to Cow College, Iowa State University, to be an English Major. I was good at drawing. I had endless story-plots bursting out of my fevered comic-book lover’s brain. And I was determined to be a story-teller and comic book artist. But arthritis crept into my hands and slowed the drawing down, my confidence dried up. I realized I was a graduated English major with no chance at ever finding a job just reading books.
So, I went to the University of Iowa, the Hawkeyes, and got myself a remedial Master of the Art of Teaching degree and a teaching certificate. And this time the door actually opened… to a life of a pedagogue. I got to perform my act six times a day in front of a hostile audience for the next 31 out of 33 years, with two years off for bad principal behavior, and time spent being a sub for every kind of teacher that there was. I got to teach everything from autistic special education to P.E. teacher to Librarian to Orchestra teacher.
Some days I was the worst teacher that ever lived. But most days I was a pretty good teacher. And I never let a bad day pass without learning something from it. And I learned to use my drawing ability on chalk boards and bulletin boards and dry-erase boards and overhead projectors. And I learned to be a good story-teller, whether it was by reading aloud or re-telling stories that were mostly factual from history, and funny stories from my own experiences. I became a fascinating nearly-human bean that could keep the attention of even ADHD twelve-year-olds for as much as twenty minutes. A good trick, that.
And when the time came to give it up, I did not go gentle into that good night. I had a miserable last year in 2013-2014 because my health was so poor. I lost money from excessive absences since I had the flu three times that year and had a son spend a week in the hospital. I retired that May and thought my life was over.
And then the real nonsense started.
I published the original AeroQuest in 2007. Then in 2012 I added Catch a Falling Star, published with I-Universe/ Penguin Books.
Once I retired, I published Magical Miss Morgan with Page Publishing. Then, disgusted with traditional publishers whom I paid more money than I ever earned from, I began self-publishing with Amazon.
Snow Babies followed, with Stardusters and Space Lizards after that.
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius,Recipes for Gingerbread Chidren, The Baby Werewolf, Sing Sad Songs, and Fools and Their Toys followed that (in order).
Then I doubled down on writing more than one story at a time.
I began rewriting AeroQuest, publishing 1,2, and 3 as of this writing.
I wrote the prequel to Snow Babies, When the Captain Came Calling. I also wrote The Boy… Forever, the sequel to The Baby Werewolf.
I have published A Field Guide to Fauns, a novel where all the main characters are nudists. And I completed a book of essays from this blog, which I call Laughing Blue.
And then I began working even harder to get my books read and reviewed.
I have gotten more five-star reviews than any other level.
I have also published The Wizard in His Keep. I published The Necromancer’s Apprentice most recently.
My current work in progress is The Haunted Toy Store. It is currently at 14, 649 words.
How much more I can get done now until my life has ended remains to be seen. But I keep on trudging on the path into the future, not knowing where it will go next… and not really worrying about it.
I have to admit it because I am into all this “naked truth” thing… I am getting lazy in my old, old age.
Yes, I have valid excuses. My eyes are failing with glaucoma and the beginnings of cataracts (not the waterfall kind.) My fingers are slowed and interfered with by arthritis. And my computer with the good word-processor is all glitchy (Who knew that eating potato chips while typing is bad for your keyboard? Oh, that’s right. My know-it-all daughter, the Princess, lectured me about that before all the glitches.)
But I have one novel finished and not published for want of editing.
And I keep starting new projects instead of finishing the one I am currently working on.
Poppy’s story is almost finished in the complete draft, but stalled over a plot point.
Golden Wing is only one-third done. It’s stuck on the hospital scene, just because I have to go back and reread the whole thing to get back into working on it.
This one is started, but off to the slowest start of anything I have done so far.
I am cheating on this one, making it out of old blog posts and writing a new one about once a week.
And this is the one most likely to get finished before I die. I am posting it on Tuesdays. As you can see, I haven’t created an actual cover for it yet. Lazy me.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Iris of the Eye
Blue eyes, brown eyes… see differently,
Bur the eyes still see,
Immune to bright sun
Or comfortable with the blue-black shadow.
Whatever the color of the eye… the seeing is the important thing.
Have you ever noticed, that all the best artists,
The ones who see and record what they see the best,
Are now dead and gone?
And all we have left of them
Are the artifacts,
What their eyes beheld,
What their hand captured and interpreted,
In paint
Or picture
In book
Or song.
Or is it only that… the new eyes remain yet to be discovered?
Whatever color your eye is now,
The iris of the eye,
Won’t you look with me?
To see?
What yet we may uncover?
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