It took three days to complete. I watched a lot of TV while I was doing the drawing. So the goofiness of this Paffooney is easy to explain. I am not, however, dissatisfied.
Tag Archives: artwork
Paffooney Updates #2 – Following the Plan
Okay, you should begin to see now that I am actually capable of finishing a project step by step. Take no note of the fact that I have done a number of creative and wacky things in a scheduled order that looks like I put my to-do list in the mixing bowl and beat it to pieces with a wire Whisk. (It is tricky to type this now, because my “o” key is giving out and I have to either punch it repeatedly, chews tu intentiunally misspell werds, or use verbiage sans that particular letter.)
I have been working on my novel projects at the same time as I have been coloring this beauty. One would assume that it was the novel When The Captain Came Calling (Thank Gawd that title has no letter “O’s” in it), but naturally, it is naught. I have been putting way more wit and words into my Sci-fi novel, Star Dusters and Lizard People, a sequel to Catch a Falling Star. The Telleron crew of Xiar’s base ship have reached the planet Galtorr Prime, in the Delta Pavonis star system, and they are beginning to explore and find out what a miserable world it is.
I also added about half a chapter to the Captain novel, but I am still introducing the little people and the Pirates. I have not even gotten to the sinister cloaked figure lurking in the shadows. (This book is actually a re-write, so I am not creating from thin air like I am with the Stardusters.)
I also spent time drawing a portrait of Sizzahl, a new character for Stardusters. She is a little girl who is a biogeneticist and a genius who also happens to be a lizard person. I will show you and tell you more about her in an upcoming post.
So, I drew this project in a step by step order that was really more of a step here, then back-track over there for a bit, then do another small step, then go over here sort of order. I can’t help it. I am what educators call a “non-linear” thinker… also known as right-brained, global thinker, or total creative nut-job.
So, since I am not following a straight path anyway, let me finish this post by plugging a friend’s book. My friend Stuart R. West is a blogger and novelist from Kansas. His humorous blog is called Twisted Tales from Tornado Alley and can be found here http://stuartrwest.blogspot.com/. I am recommending his new book that can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com. I haven’t read it yet, but the book is called The Secret Society of Like-Minded Individuals : Book I
I honestly think you will like it. If you can stand or understand my writing, you will find Stuart to 
be very much the same kind of wacko bird. I have to admit though, he does scary way better than me. He knows his way around a thriller. (And thank Gawd his name is not Stooart. Dang “o” key!)
Filed under artwork, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Paffooney Updates #1
The work on this latest Paffooney is coming along nicely. I confessed to mess-ups yesterday. Today I can show you real progress without further oopsies. The figure of Valerie Clarke is the most important part of both this illustration and my novel project. She is the single focus-character in When The Captain Came Calling. I usually vary the focus character from scene to scene in my fiction, because I have a pathological need to play around inside the heads of multiple characters. This book will be the first one I’ve written to stay inside the same head through the entire novel. The story, assuming it doesn’t totally take on a life of its own and change itself, is about how a young girl sees and evaluates the people in her life… Mom, Dad, the boy she has a crush on, the girlfriend of that boy, the goofy members of the Norwall Pirates (a 4-H softball team and liars’ club dedicated to adventure, story-telling, and being a kid while you can), weird people who live in tiny Iowa farm towns, and mysterious strangers who can somehow be invisible. It is about friendship, love, sex, and growing up. It is also about overly-protective parents and a world full of dark magic and mysterious dangers. I am trying to capture that in my Paffooney, to hopefully make it into a possible cover illustration. I intend to show you in this blog each stage in the completion of the project… the making of colored-pencil Paffoonery.
Filed under artwork, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Work in Progress
Here is the straight poop. (Wait a minute! Not poop metaphors again!) Okay, better idiomatic expression… Here is the truthful statement about work habits. (Better! But that was idiomatic not idiotic, right?) Right.
Sometimes I mess up. I am working slowly and steadily on the next story burning to be told, When the Captain Came Calling. In the illustration I am working on, you can probably see the mess-ups already. I very carefully blot my black ink pens when I am doing the pen and ink work. Even ball point pens can blot. I will admit I press entirely too hard on both ink pens and colored pencils. I break a lot of colored lead and make a lot of black pens bleed. I have arthritis in my hands and often push too hard because I am pushing back against the pain. I can sometimes use a lighter touch with the colored pencil, the area being covered may require a more lightly penciled mark and have more paper whiteness showing through. Black pen lines are never like that. To get a steady, even line, I push with pressure to get things dark and full and even. The pen that I was using had developed a leaky ball and had to be blotted with every use. When it made the first smear, I changed to a new pen. I cussed a little too. (Cussing makes it better. I learned that from Mark Twain.) But I didn’t panic and throw the drawing out. I can fix it up a bit when I add the color. But the second pen I was using was a pen I switched out earlier for bleeding. That’s how I got the second smear. Dang me! It almost ruined what I think is a very promising portrait of my main character Valerie Clarke. (Valerie, whom you may remember from Snow Babies posts, is based on a girl I once had a crush on, and my own daughter, the Princess.)
Now, ink smears are not the only thing that had to be twisted and worked around to get this project underway and at least a little bit tamed. The title was originally a problem. I tried to call this story The Captain Came because of the primary antagonist and the fact that he is returning from the South Seas to the little Iowa town of Norwall. This was a problem because Captain Dettbarn was running from a bunch of psychotic little Juju men (animated Tiki idols) who were chasing him because he made the witch doctor’s chief’s daughter pregnant. That made the title an R-rated joke that I hadn’t intended even before I considered this story a YA novel idea.
The Juju men themselves are problem. In this time of unintended racism, I had to work on them to make them be something other than a racial stereotype. They were not originally made entirely of wood. I had to eliminate cartoonist’s shortcuts in depiction that made them look like little black men or little dark brown men. They are of an indeterminate South Seas racial stock. Their language is mostly Tagalog (because it is a language I have tried to learn due to Filipino relatives). Their culture is mostly movie fiction that comes from the Captain’s own liar’s brain. Most of the information about the witch doctor and the mysterious island come from the Captain’s logbook which is a work of fiction written by a drunkard with a vivid imagination. So I am trying to be fair to a people and race that don’t actually exist outside of the story within the story. Whew! I’ve got to stop explaining complicated things now before my brain melts. Smoke is already coming out of my ears and making it hard to see here in my studio.
Filed under humor, illustrations, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Faeries
In my book The Magical Miss Morgan, the teacher, Miss Francis Morgan, has to deal not only with a crisis in her personal teaching world, but a crisis brewing in the magical fairy kingdom of Tellosia. The fairies have come seeking Francis’ aid because she, as a teacher, has direct access to children and can affect what they believe in. You see, the fairies suffer from a general lack of belief in fairies, something that has been plaguing them more and more as the modern world makes it more and more difficult for children to actually believe. Soon they will wink out of existence for lack of believers. Francis’ younger brother, Milt, is a wizard. He knows some fairies personally, and he has told them that Francis can help them. So, because Milt revealed her to them, the Erlking, leader of the fairies of Tellosia, has sent three chosen representatives to plead for her help.
The leader of the trio is Donner. He is the dragonfly-winged pixie who is a leader of the wasp-riders. At three full inches in height, he is one of the biggest and most leader-ish of the fairies, the reason he was chosen to head the mission. He speaks very much in the old style and has a hard time getting his ideas across to a creative teacher-type from the 1990’s.
Silkie, the Storybook, is a beautiful fairy who, because she is a Storybook fairy, is immortal. She has been immortal since Hans Christian Andersen used her adventures that she had related to him to create the story of Little Tiny or Thumbelina in 1835. Any time a fairy is immortalized by a human author, that fairy becomes a Storybook and is destined to live forever. She is very old and very wise, but also very human-looking and very-very small.
Garriss, the third fairy, is a wisp. Wisps are elemental beings made of fire, water, stone, or air. They are rumored to be incredibly stupid, because their little brains are composed entirely of one element. Garriss is a fire wisp. He has a temper because his brain is made of fire. Torchy, also pictured, is also rather stupid and foolish. But fire wisps prove to have a very warm heart.
So, if you can stand fairy tales at all, I hope you will clap your hands and believe in the fairies in my book. I intend to submit it to the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ YA Novel Contest in April of 2015. The hand clapping should definitely help… unless James M. Barrie lied to us in his book Peter Pan.
Dreams Really Do Come True
Last night a tornado dream, the one I posted about on January 4th, came true. We had five earthquakes in Carrollton, Texas. Of course, none of the epicenters were in Carrollton. They were a few miles away in Irving, Texas. But tornado dreams always precede some sort of disaster, usually a personal tragedy. I realized during the final pair of shakes around 8:15 last nigh that the dream truly was about the earthquakes. Remember, we were looking out the south windows of the farm house, my mother and I, at the funnel cloud, and the south windows are located right next to the storm cellar. The storm cellar is safety. It has symbolized safety in my mind since the night we spent in the basement in Rowan, Iowa when the tornado ripped the shingles off the roof of our house. We were safe that night, and we were safe last night because none of the earthquakes were worse than a 3.6 on the Richter Scale. Earthquakes that are that mild do little or no damage. My mother was in the tornado dream because she heard about the earthquakes on the news she was watching up in Iowa (at the same farm place where the dream was set),and she emailed me about the earthquakes to make certain my family and I were safe. So it was another dream of future events, and it did come true… at least in my goofy little mind.
Dreams come true in more than one way. I finished the initial edit of my contest novel, The Magical Miss Morgan. I now believe firmly that it is the best novel I have yet written. It is short. At 44,500 words it is barely more than the minimum acceptable word-count for the contest. It is simple. The main plot is about Francis Morgan having her notions of what constitutes good teaching tested by a parent, a school board member, and an angry principal. The first subplot is about a group of fairies who recruit Francis to help them save the fairy kingdom of Tellosia from a lack of the vital belief in fairies necessary to overcome evil. The second subplot is about one of her favorite students undergoing an attack on her belief in herself from another student. Main plot and two subplots are almost too few for me and my fevered, fertile comic imagination. I can’t seem to juggle (usually) without twenty balls in the air at once. But the simplicity of this novel is one of its main charms, and a quality I am hoping may help win the writing contest. I know from my experiences with the novel Snow Babies that I am not far from reaching the top in a writing contest.
The dream may also have signaled an important milestone in my continuing health problems. I ruled out the things that are most likely to kill me in my recent cardiologist quest. I do not have heart problems after all. I only have six incurable diseases, and am still a cancer survivor (the growth removed from the back of my head was infected, but not cancerous. I only have diabetes, arthritis, hypertension, COPD, psoriasis, and an enlarged prostate. Nothing is bad enough by itself to be unmanageable and deadly). So I am probably going to be alive for a few more years and able to draw and write more. I was forced to retire from teaching by health problems, but now that I am managing my debt with help from a lawyer and do not have the stress from a job, I actually have fewer sick days, more money to spend, and enough time to do the artistic work that I have always wanted to do.
So I close with the Disney song in my head… “A dream is a wish your heart makes… and dreams really do come true.”
Fire Wisps
In the novel I just recently finished, The Magical Miss Morgan, there are several different kinds of fairies. The fairies in the book may or may not really be there. They are a part of the magic the teacher, who is the main character, uses to be a superior teacher. She engages the imaginations of her students and they love her for it. Still, an important part of the plot revolves around a small group of fairies intent on a quest meant to save their fairy kingdom called Tellosia from a take-over attempt by evil fairies. One of the main character fairies is the fire wisp, Garriss, seen here with his little brother Torchy. Fire wisps are fairies made of elemental magic, so they can be fire, water, wind, and stone. They are made of the element they represent, and so, with a brain made of fire they are not terribly smart. They do, however, have very warm hearts, which Garriss proves to Miss Morgan, to Blueberry Bates, and to all the school children who dare to believe in fairies and fairy magic. Garriss is totally contained by fire magic, and therefore doesn’t set the teacher’s desk on fire when he walks on it. In fact, the only way he can burn anything is through the cone of fire spell written on his hands. And even then, since he is not very bright (in a mental capacity), he has to be allowed to use it by his fairy friends, Silkie, the Storybook fairy, and Donner the Pixie.
This Paffooney is the first one I drew of any of the fairy characters in Miss Morgan’s story, but it is not the last. I intend to draw more of them in the coming days.
Dippy Duck Dreams
The hardest dream-to-reality connection to make is my duck nightmare. I know I bummed the world out yesterday with unfunny dream deliberations. But in this post I explore the lighter side of nightmares. It all began when I was about four years old and we went to the Deer Park Zoo in Mason City, Iowa.
Truthfully, when you look at it from the proper point of view, at four you are small and all animals look like monsters. The three ostriches they had in a chicken-wire pen were at least several hundred feet tall. The deer were huge with giant Bambi-eyes. I was little and still very much in a touchy-feely stage of life. And the goose-pen had a large hole in the front, just large enough for a goose head and neck to fit through at high speed. That is exactly what happened when one wide-eyed nerd-child wandered close enough to give a gander a premium chance at a beak-first goosing. Whether my pants had to be changed immediately afterwards is something I have yet to work up the courage to ask my parents about. No rush. They are only in their eighties now.
Anyway, I was left with a recurring nightmare, always involving a duck or very similar waterfowl with big, massive, white dentures. Yes, you heard right, a duck with teeth. It’s all right for you to laugh now, but I woke up in cold sweat every single time I had that nightmare. Right from the moment when I realize that the evil little duck-mind has fixed its wishes on taking a nice, big bite, to the split second where the toothy duck-head zips towards me, I am gripped with total existential terror. And it wakes me up.
So what does this doozy of a dream mean? Do dreams have to have a meaning? All two-hundred-plus times? (I lost count, so sue me.) I do believe, however that it must be some kind of anxiety dream. And the last occurrence was now four years ago, so the possibility of duck-dream remission is very real to me.
If my last post chilled your innards, then hopefully this one lit them up with laughing gas.
This closing Paffooney from yesterday is entitled “The Leap of Faith”. I’m not sure why that is important to know, but it is.
Stupid People
It is generally considered an insult to call someone “stupid”.
Okay, I get that. I am not without feelings on the subject. Stupid people have feelings just like I do. But if I have to live with “nerd”, “geekazoid”, “brainiac”, and “four-eyes”, I am thinking they don’t have to be more sensitive than I am.
Truthfully, life as a mentally gifted person of no color is a bit of trial even if people don’t generally understand that. I have an I.Q. in the range of 155, (calculated from my ACT and SAT scores using standard statistical analysis, give or take 5% for margin of error due to the nature of the calculation… am I scaring you yet?) I had trouble fitting in with my peers as a child. I related better to older people rather than my appropriate age group, and until my best friend, a preacher’s kid, moved to town when I was nine, I really had no friends and was routinely picked on and preyed upon by other kids. It was so bad that I was making C’s and D’s in school primarily because I didn’t want to be identified as smart. Once the eye doctor hung black horn-rimmed glasses on my face, my fate as a socially doomed uber-nerd was sealed. And my friend Mark, who would grow up to become an actuary with mathematical gifts, moved away when I was a freshman in high school. I had to help stupid people with homework and class work… I was required to endure threats, bribes, and tearful pleas to help athletes cheat on tests. Bullies made me tie their shoes and endure endless jokes about the size of my private parts. Life was terrible until I decided to go out for high school football. I was small and thin and probably doomed as I made the team, but I had a secret weapon. I understood almost instinctually that angles, trajectories, and leverage can make the difference over sheer muscle power. During one football drill where we had to pick up and carry our partner for five yards, I was matched with the big offensive tight end, George Merlock, who outweighed me by almost a hundred pounds and was literally Incredible Hulk-like in football pads. I simply used my shoulder on the proper spot under his armpit and lifted with my legs. I picked him up and carried him for twenty yards when some of the other players who were bigger and stronger than me couldn’t even lift him. After that moment, I was never bullied again. For one thing, I impressed George so much that he would’ve killed them for even looking at me cross-eyed. Life got better. A cheerleader asked me out on a date (though I said no because I thought they were still making fun of me… which I later learned I was mistaken about and I had accidentally hurt her feelings).
So what does that whole long-winded whiffle-story of my misspent youth have to do with stupid people? Well, I am one. (Doesn’t the cheerleader thing prove that?) Smart people can be stupid more often than your average ordinary Joe. A character like Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory is funny because his intelligence and his social abilities are so wildly mismatched that he often makes totally stupid geekazoid mistakes.
But there are also stupid people who are actually not smart. Writing humor has taught me to draw upon the experiences of people I have known who were less than knowledgeable. People with lower than normal I.Q.’s. Life has taught me to value and even love people like that. In my novel Snow Babies, at least one of the clown characters is a stupid person. Harker Dawes is an inept businessman in the process of destroying a successful business that he bought from one of the town’s most beloved and respected elders. He immobilizes himself with super glue. He gets nailed to a poster board with a nail gun. Accidents and near-fatal pratfalls are his trademark. And yet, he is a sympathetic and loveable character. He is generous to a fault. He has a simple, good heart. Practically everything he does is a mistake, and yet, people grow fond of him and help him out because they appreciate his innate goodness and value as a person.
So, I really think calling someone stupid can be a sort of compliment. Forrest Gump calls himself stupid, but that character from Winston Groom’s novels and the award-winning movie of the same name is really a very wise and lovely man, though he is not smart. I have to say that I really no longer resent being called stupid, because no matter how smart I actually am, stupid is sort of a compliment. (But how about climate-change deniers, Texas politicians, and anybody who believes what they say on Fox News, you say? They are not stupid. That is willful ignorance. It may take a whole other post to make that difference clear.)
Filed under characters, clowns, colored pencil, drawing, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Watch Me Pull a Rabbit Out of My Hat!
Sometimes I don’t believe in the magic I believe in… Er, well, it is something like that. I mean, things happen in life that you never imagine could be possible. Some things are unbelievably bad, and others are unbelievably good. For instance, the Cardinals lost their last two football games. They had an amazing year with eleven wins and a spot in the playoffs, but the @#&$$!!! St. Louis Rams broke their first AND their second string quarterbacks in that last win they won. No more wins for this year barring a playoff miracle. And I had been developing a heart problem since we went to San Diego in October to see my son graduate from Marine boot camp. I have been waking up every night with heartbeat arrhythmia… at least, that’s what I thought it was, and what the doctor suspected it was… but it wasn’t. I went in yesterday to get the bad news from the cardiologist, and he showed me test results that proved my heart is totally healthy and beating normally. Apparently I was being fooled by muscle spasms in my chest caused by arthritis in my rib-cage. Don’t that beat all? Bullwinkle shows us there is nothing up his sleeve, reaches in into the magic hat expecting to pull out a lion, and we get a little white rabbit.
Catch a Falling Star 