Susu, my imaginary granddaughter, is looking down from the window.
Disappointing Outcomes
This is an all-felt recreation of my picture of the Girl with the Green Eyes. It was simply a matter of running my digital picture through the AI Mirror Felt Filter which used its special AI magic to transfer every part of the image into a needlecraft-looking thingy made of what appears to be felt. But no beaver pelts were chewed on to make it. It is a brief look at what the incredibly single-minded magic of AI can actually do. And I would like to submit more of my artwork to this filter, but that would cost money to use it. That’s the thing about AI. It is meant to generate lots of money for somebody… and that somebody is not me.
I enjoy using digital and AI tools to draw. Arthritis and color blindness and muscle spasms have been leeching away my art abilities. These tools make drawing easier and not only restore my drawing ability, they help me go beyond what I have done before.
This gives you an idea of what I used to be able to do, drawing freehand and blending colors with colored pencils. I have been told by friends and family familiar with my older artworks that they prefer my old style to the new anime-style, AI-filter digital stuff. And I understand that sentiment completely. I wish I still could do that.
This is an example of the very best I can do the old way that is also done this year. The colors are no longer fully blended and solidified. It hurts too much to put enough layers on to achieve the solid colors and the blends. My hands no longer manage the repetitions of small lines in layers.
This is about an hour’s worth of work on the digital drawing pad. You can see the basic design and you can also see the splotches and glitches caused by arthritis. I did take it further before applying the AI Mirror art editor, but the flaws are not gone until the AI cleans them up completely.
Here it is after the first application of AI Mirror.
Then clothing is added. That, of course, needs to be cleaned up too and a background added.
And I reach an endpoint that satisfies my need to draw and create. Picsart AI Photo Editor inserted the background.
I know there is way too much AI artwork out there on the web. Much of it is downright lazily created and awful. I hope mine isn’t too. But I have seen things that are masterfully done which reveal possibilities of using AI tools in very artful ways. I am not satisfied with AI art on the internet. But I don’t believe we are wasting our time completely either.
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Depressing Pessimisting
I have been feeling low and mortality is weighing heavy upon me. My dog has cancer and she is probably dying. She’s already slowing and not going on the usual walks with me. My dad’s little dog stopped going on walks shortly before she died. And my dad loved her enough that he only survived her by a couple of years. I am seeing an alarming pattern here.
, My health is headed downhill. I can’t read and write like I did two years ago. I am floundering and passing out frequently. But I can still draw with the aid of digital tools and AI art and photo editing apps. I am using a Drawing Pad program with AI Mirror and Picsart AI Photo Editor. I can draw faster and better than ever before. But it is a matter of doing what I can before I die.
Sorry to be such a downer, but I am not looking forward birthday number 68 and the world it will happen in.
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Creepy’s Haunted House
“Hey, howdy, Pearla! Fancy meeting you out here, outside the new house I am going to haunt. You wanna come along and help me ghostify a few terrified human-types?”
“Oh, no, Creepy. Look at all the lights on in there. People might actually see me. And I am not wearing any ghost clothes. I don’t want humans to see me naked.”
“Ghosts is supposed to be naked, Pearla. Didn’t you ever read those Casper the Friendly Ghost comic books when you were a living kid?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you ever see Casper or the Ghostly Trio wearing any pants?”
“Well, no. “
“That’s it then. They all walk around naked all the time in that comic book. Every issue. No ghost clothes!”
“Wendy the Witch is never naked.”
“Yes, but she ain’t a ghost. The uniform for kid witches is funky red pajamas. But I’ll bet she goes naked as soon as she dies.”
“Do kids in comic books ever die?”
“Well, where did Casper and Spooky and Poil come from if they don’t? They are ghosts.”
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Yes, I admit it. I was a weird kid. I loved Casper comics because I thought they were practicing nudism. It didn’t bother me that they had no genitals. When you are a kid, genitals are pretty much a nightmare waiting to happen. We might live better lives if we died as kids and became ghosts with no genitals. Of course, civilization would end sooner if everybody did it. I had weird thoughts as a kid. Maybe due to the fact that I was victimized at age ten. But weird thoughts are creative thoughts. And I can create my way out of anything.
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Hydra Hair
No, this isn’t a post about the Avengers… but that’s a cool idea. I just haven’t seen the new movie yet. I will… so be patient. You probably don’t really need a lot of comic-book fan-boy love right now anyway… That is such a nerd-need, and you are not a nerd… at least, I haven’t been corrected about nerd-things on my blog, which leads me to conclude there are no nerds reading my squishy-goofy-gallywumpas. This post is about my daughter, the Princess.
Specifically, this is a post about the Princess’ hair. You see, the Princess was unfortunate enough to be exactly between two opposite extremes of hair-genes. She inherited her mother’s thick, dark wire-hair, but the wild-hair, mind-of-its-own crazy go-every-direction hair she got from me. She inherits the worst hair-features from both of us. So how do you to tame your hair in the mornings when you have thick, unruly hair that not only refuses to be tamed, but will willingly grab the brush out of your hand and throw it across the room? Well, you apparently borrow your brother’s comb without permission and give the hair 500 rat-nest-dislodging yanks and then lose the comb so that your brother is mad at you for the rest of the day… I mean, the rest of the week… er, the month, the year… maybe the rest of the Princess’ life.
This morning;
Me; “Please don’t eat your brother’s comb when you are finished doing that. Put it back on the sink in the bathroom before we go to school.” (This is a helpful dad-statement used every morning when I watch her battling the hair at the breakfast table, but inevitably the comb is missing the next time brother Henry looks for it. She must eat it when my back is turned to go start the car.)
Princess; “I will, Dad… Geez…. But I can’t believe all the hair I have now on my pants and shirt. How can I lose this much hair every day and not be bald?”
“Princess, you are really, really good at growing hair.”
“Oh, I know it. In fact, I’m pretty sure when I pull out one hair, three grow back to take its place.”
“Wow! That’s like mythological, or something. Do you wake up in the night to find little Hercules-type guys climbing up on your pillow trying to cut your hair with swords?”
“Yeah, it keeps me awake at night. But you know in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Books, the hydra has to be turned to stone or be burned with fire to defeat it.” (I cannot, of course, argue this point as she has read all of the books and is an irrefutable expert on the subject of Rick Riordan’s mythology.)
“Oh, mercy! You mean the little Hercules-guys are climbing on your pillow with torches?”
“Yes, but I got a bunch of little Minotaur-guys to fight them off, so my hair hasn’t been burned.”
“Well, that’s good… but what about all the little cow patties they leave in your blankets?”
“Dad, hair problems are hard. You can’t expect to have it all easy, right?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney
A Silly Side-Note and Picture Paffooney
I was trying to figure out a way to cheat today and post something that didn’t take a lot of time and effort, but appealed to an audience looking for humor, art, poop jokes, cute kids, or inspiration, or whatever the heck else people make the mistake of looking at my blog for. I came up with this amalgam. Amalgam is a good word. It means different things all mashed up together to make something new. You will note I took several old things I have already done and mushed them together into a single bizarre Paffooney picture of mostly pink and blue. I promise that I will work harder tomorrow to do whatever it is that I actually do… and for today… well, it isn’t totally bad. I usually do very similar stuff, but with way more words.
Here is a close-up of the prose-poem in case you don’t want to make the effort it takes to click on the picture and blow it up a bit;
A Space Filler Just to Keep It Going…
This short essay is here to keep my string of consecutive days with at least one post going.
This should be post number 260.
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Cloudscapes
Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!” This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution. (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)
Look at a couple of my cloudscapes. Do you see angels?
Cloudscapes (a poem)
Blue and white and filled with light…
The cloudscape burns with angels…
And wholly bought with grace unsought…
I long to fly with angels…
Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?
I see them there, they’re angels!
So, there you have it. I’m a loon. I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin. But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences. Creativity has its price. And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul. If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.
The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek ἄγγελος ángelos, The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature. (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)
I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits. I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God. So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me. I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on. Here is the pencil sketch;
This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke. In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself. But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle. She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle. I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.
The finished picture.
Drawing with AI Assistance
I find this to be a beautiful picture worth the time spent creating it. It is a digital doodle. That means I started with a simple doodle out of my head.
This is the original start, laid down on my computer tablet with a stylus and a digital art program called Drawing Pad Sketch Desk. It is a simpler drawing program than most digital artists use. My daughter recommends Krita. That is far more complex and sophisticated than I was ready to start with.
This is the rather ugly doodle scratched out with layout colors and basic shapes. Had this been colored pencil on paper, I would have wadded it up, shot it into a wastebasket, hopefully for three points, and started again. But the digital pad allows infinite and complete changes.
After fixing and fixing and fixing… and adding a rose in the hair… and something green to match the eyes, I came up with something I wanted to create a finished project out of. I did not take a screenshot of every little change, so you must imagine how I got here from Miss Ugly Puss.
Because of arthritis in my hands and creeping color blindness in my eyes, I use AI Mirror to reprocess my drawing and offer clean-up solutions. I don’t really like the rose that the program made out of my original drawing, so I changed it before the final. Then I used the Picsart AI Photo Editor to supply a background of roses. Thus, I reached the picture you see in the first Paffooney I posted here.
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Catch a Falling Star 
The Way Mickey’s Mind Works
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will make that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
Here’s the link to the finished book.
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Filed under commentary, goofiness, humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as Sing Sad Songs