Tag Archives: art

June 7, 2024 · 1:33 am

Something Creative Goes Here

Not Alone

Sometimes the creative brain gets a little too hot and needs time to cool.  That means I need a meaningless filler post to maintain my every-day posting.  So, I give you a picture of Mike Murphy carrying his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates’ books home from the bus stop on a country road in Iowa.  And, of course, they happen to meet an alien named George Jetson, whose father named him after a character on his favorite Earther TV show from the 60’s.  It is a strange thing to have your brain over-heat from too many creative neurons firing at the same time.  But it can lead to notions of intergalactic peace and cultural exchange… or racist comments like, “Tellerons have heads that look like giant boogers!”  But I should be able think more rationally tomorrow.  I hope that turns out to be a good thing.

2 Comments

Filed under aliens, artwork, blog posting, conspiracy theory, goofiness, Paffooney, self pity

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

Image

Norwall

rowan schoolThe little Iowa town where all my hometown novels are set is based on the little town where I grew up and spent all of my school years from Kindergarten to Senior Year of High School.  I call it Norwall.  It has all the same letters in it as the town of Rowan, the real town behind all my farm-boy fantasies.  I also added an “L” for love and an “L” for laughter.  All these stories, whether written already or still percolating in my demented bean, are set in this little town.

The school building where I went to learn through the sixth grade was gone after the 1980’s.  But the gymnasium with its theater built in still stands and is used as a community center to this day.  It was here where I had my first crush, where I first saw a girl naked who was not my relative, where I was deeply embarrassed during the square-dancing lessons in Miss Molton’s Music Class, and where I told such big black hoo-haw lies that I truly got the proper training I needed to be a story-teller.

DSCN4641

This isn’t what Main Street really looked like to me.  I saw it in the 1960’s and 70’s.  This is the 1950’s, when the artist who created this blanket was in high school.  But It contains the world I knew.  The water tower is missing, but the fire station and post office are there at the far end of the street on your left.  The grocery store, the cafeteria with its George’s Malt Shop sign, the Brenton Bank building, and the hardware store are there on the left.  The town hall and V.F.W. is on the right hidden by the trees.  You can just see the steeple of the old Congregational Church that was torn down and moved to a new location during some of my earliest memories of the street.

DSCN7135

This is what it looks like now that the hardware store is gone.  The bank and the cafeteria have been updated and changed.    The water tower has changed from silver to blue.

The Methodist Church, built in the thirties and torn down in the eighties, was an important part of my boyhood.  It was a place where my faith in God was nurtured and reinforced to the point that my highly active and existential mind could never truly turn to atheism and doubt.  It was also the place where a Methodist minister took the time to explain the facts of life to me and helped me overcome the terrible secret I kept inside me about being molested when I was ten.  In more than one way, my life was saved in this building.  I miss the place terribly.

DSCN4642

So, here it is, the town that made me who I am and provides the background for the most important thinking and writing that I will ever be able to do.

DSCN7136DSCN7134

Leave a comment

June 6, 2024 · 12:02 am
June 4, 2024 · 2:08 am

Western Art

Yesterday, on Friday the Thirteenth, we went to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth.  My parents, both in their eighties, took us there in a week-long celebration of Dorin’s graduation from high school.  It was a worthy thing.  Unlike most kids, my three are not bored to apoplexy by art museums.  In fact, for most of the exhibitions, they traveled at my heels.  It seems I know enough about art to fascinate them.  All three of them are amateur artists themselves.

The Amon Carter Museum is centered on old Mr. Carter’s collection of the paintings of Frederick Remington and Charles Russell.

Remington was an adventurer and story-teller.  He was also a sculptor with a gift for creating action-filled scenes in bronze.  The Bronco Buster, the statue pictured here, is on prominent display in the foyer of the museum.  It is one of Remington’s first, and one of his best known (in large part due to the Amon Carter Collection).  The painting that follows was used as an illustration for one of his western stories.  Remington wrote western novels, articles about the west, and factual essays about Native Americans.  He had actually lived with Indians for a while and did a lot to lend credibility to everything he wrote about them.  He didn’t save them from the depredations of the white man, but then, who could have done that?  His nighttime scene is ultra-realistic and you can learn a lot about Indians just by studying the picture.

Russell came after Remington by a few years, but he was a contemporary and an admirer of Remington’s work.  Russell is also an artist of intricate detail and accuracy, having also studied Indians from inside their villages and camps.  The Silk Robe painting shown below and exhibited at the Carter reveals detailed knowledge of curing a buffalo hide that only could have come from watching the process in real life.  He also did bronze sculpture and watercolor paintings along with his fantastic oil paintings.  In fact, in his day, Russell was considered a sculptor who also paints.  I don’t know how you can look at his cowboy art and still believe that.   He is a truly masterful painter.

You’ll have to forgive me for taking a break from the usual humor blog, but I have an overwhelming love for art and painting, and this museum visit put an Indian arrow right through my silly old heart.

images frederic-remington-bronco Remington-The-Grass-Fire-AmonCarter 1961-381_s_0 1280px-russell_loops_and_swift_horses_are_surer_than_lead_1916 1961-141_s_0 cmrretro_dam_1209_07 images (1) the-wolfers-camp

4 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

May 16, 2024 · 1:17 am

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , ,

May 13, 2024 · 12:28 am

A Silly Side-Note and Picture Paffooney

pink n blue22

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;

pink n blue212

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, kids, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 10, 2024 · 1:02 am

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.

This leads you to my most recently published book on Amazon. A book full of evil poems that may effect your mind and heart, though hopefully in a good way. Black Magic via incantation.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

May 4, 2024 · 2:20 am

Paffooney Stories and Toony Cartoons

My House1 My house2 my house3 My House4Here is a page for collected stories that I mean to build on and expand.  It is my intention to file cartoons here and edit them and add more pages via posts.  So for a first attempt let me use an old cartoon that was rejected once by Heavy Metal magazine in the early 1980’s and rejected a second time by a cartoon magazine that no longer exists and I can’t even remember the name of…  I am thinking they had very poor taste in cartoon art anyway.

Now, of course, this a finished four-page one-shot.  It was intended for a magazine that sought this kind of full-color art and had an over-all science fiction and horror fantasy theme.  I was too light and colorful with this short for their needs.  Disney characters on the PJ’s might have been a legal problem too.  So I am left with an unsaleable example of my best colored-pencil art, done when I was still pretty much a clueless kid and not yet a teacher.  It was worth doing, but will never make me a single dime.

Leave a comment

Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

April 21, 2024 · 2:34 am

Drawing Nudists

Drawing people with no clothes on is something I actually learned to do in college. Even more ironic is the fact that I was still suffering a nude-o-phobia at the time due to being traumatized by a sexual assault at age ten that had been a repressed memory until the year before I took the anatomy drawing class with live nude models. It was not a class full of guys since you had to have made high grades in three previous levels of drawing classes. There were only three other males in the class, and none of them were significantly more secure in their own nakedness than I was. Virgins all. (What do you expect from male art majors?) But it began my journey into drawing nudes and eventually becoming a nudist.

Drawing a nude figure in a work of art, whether by painting, drawing with a pencil, colored pencils, or digital art on a computer, is an essential step to creating believable figures even after you put clothing on them. Anatomical correctness in structure and proportions are far more realistic when originally drawn by your practiced hand as a nude figure. My mother noted when watching me paint that the pencil drawing underneath looked like a naked body until clothed by a rendering of a body covering, even if I was working from a model or photo that was fully clothed. Being a modest Methodist she often asked if I intended to draw clothes on before painting, which I usually did… especially on pictures painted at home where she would see.

When I am intentionally drawing a nudist picture, I will depict an activity that I enjoy doing in the nude myself. The figure, a male figure, represents me. I do tend to depict myself as an innocent child rather than a fat old man with a beard. I also draw nude girls, usually in the age of innocence, because I don’t have any reason to do porn. And drawing nudes helps me immensely with my own positive body image problem.

Pictures of nudists do not need to reveal sexual features. I don’t particularly enjoy drawing genitals. And the idea of the picture usually does not require those things to be in the picture.

Sometimes the theme of the picture is intended to be humorous. Streaking back in the 1970s always got a lot of laughs, as well as evil looks from old church ladies.

Fairy nudity is also usually given a pass. Why would tiny magical creatures really need clothes?

Some pictures evoke memories of camping, Something we did as a family every summer in the 60s and 70s, though never in the nude… except in my imagination.

And of course, some pictures need to exist simply because the human body is inherently beautiful.

All of this is talked about in the essay I wrote about it in book form on Amazon. It goes into much greater detail with many more illustrations.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

April 19, 2024 · 1:09 am

Drawing for a Lifetime

I was born an artist. It has to be developed and nurtured and practiced over time to become what it can truly be, but artistic talent is something you are born with, and there is a genetic aspect to it. Great Aunt Viola could draw and paint. She produced impressive art during her lifetime. My father can draw. He has demonstrated ability a number of times, though he never developed it. Both my brother and I can draw and have done a lot of it. All three of my children can draw and paint. My daughter, the Princess, even wants to pursue a career in graphic design and animation.

One of the factors that weighs heavily on a career in art is the starving artist factor. To be a serious artist, you have to study art in great detail. You need lots of practice, developing not only pencil-pushing prowess, but having an artist’s eyeball, that way of seeing that twists and turns the artist’s subject to find the most novel and interesting angle. It takes a great deal of time. And if you are doing this alone, you are responsible also for building your own following and marketing your own work and creating your own brand. You need to be three people in one and do this while potentially not being able to make any money at all for it. I have taught myself to do the art part, but I paid the bills with something else I loved to do, teaching English to hormone-crazed middle-schoolers.

An important part of art is what you have to sacrifice to do it.

Many artists become alcoholics, drug users, or suicidal manic-depressives. There is an artistic sort of PTSD. Doing real art costs a lot because it alters your lifestyle, your mental geography, and your spiritual equilibrium. Depending on how much of yourself you put into it, it can use you up, leaving no “you” left within you.

I am not trying to leave you with the impression that I mean to scare you into not wanting to be an artist. For many reasons it is a great thing to be. But it is a lot like whether you are born gay or straight… or somewhere in between. The choice is not entirely up to you. You can only control what you do with the awful gift of art once it is given to you. And that is a serious choice to make. Me, I have to draw. I have to tell stories. My life and well-being depend on it. It is the only way I can be me.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, drawing, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , ,

April 10, 2024 · 1:08 am

Pez Head

If you have seen any of my numerous posts about dolls or old books or even, you guessed it, Pez dispensers, you know how badly I am gifted with hoarding disorder.  You know the disease.  Every old string-saving grandpa or scrap-booking maiden aunt you had as a kid had it.  Piles and piles of useless and pointless things all neatly stacked and sorted somewhere in the house, or possibly garage… lurking like a monster of many pieces waiting to take over the whole house.

I can’t help it.  Collections have to be completed.  If you see it and you don’t already have it, you must possess it.  Twenty-seven cents short of the full price with tax included?  Go out to the car and dig in the cup holder.  Oops!  Can’t part with those particular State Quarters.  Will they take that many pennies?  Have to try.

C360_2017-04-08-09-45-07-112

Lately I have been victimized by a combination of my disorder and the fact that Toys-R-Us is a convenient restroom stop on the rush-hour drive along I-35 to pick up the Princess at her high school in Carrollton, Texas and my son Henry at his school in Lewisville, Texas.  It is a killer two hours and I need to go potty at the halfway point.  And I can’t make my way to the restroom without passing the Pez dispenser display.  And I can’t pass the Pez dispenser display without… well, you know.

C360_2017-04-08-09-44-34-460

What can I say?  I’m diabetic.  I have to visit the restroom frequently.

C360_2017-04-27-08-46-47-764

And they do look good on my bookshelves with a lot of the other junk I collect.

C360_2017-04-27-08-47-45-109

And not all of these are new, bought some time this school year.  In fact, not most of them.

C360_2017-04-27-08-47-56-750

And they only cost a couple of dollars each.

C360_2017-04-27-08-48-08-562

And I do resist the urge to buy one once in a while… honest, I really do.

C360_2017-04-27-08-49-05-335

And see here?  Only Minnie Mouse and Pluto  on this shelf are new.  And how could I leave this collection without Minnie and Pluto?

And it’s not like butterfly collecting, which I shamefully admit I did as a kid.  You don’t kill and mount Pez dispensers.  Although I admit, I really don’t know for sure how their factory works.

But I also have to admit, Pez dispensers aren’t the only thing that turns my collecting urge up to the highest possible settings.

C360_2017-04-20-13-28-15-571

So don’t hate me for hoarding.  If you’re worried, all of these things are available in stores too.  And I have worked on my photographicalizing skills a bit to share them with you.  And who knows where these treasures will end up when I pass on to the cartoonist’s paint box in the sky?  My daughter has vowed not to let them end up in a landfill somewhere.  Somebody will play with them and love them when I’m finally done.  MAYBE EVEN FUTURE GRANDCHILDREN.   There is a possibility, you know… always a possibility.

C360_2017-04-27-06-11-02-515

Leave a comment

Filed under collecting, foolishness, happiness, humor, photo paffoonies, photos, self portrait, sharing, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as , , , , , ,