Tag Archives: artwork

Working With Miss Morgan

Here is a sample from my work in progress, The Magical Miss Morgan.

Canto Nineteen – The Ghost House after Dark

“Bobby couldn’t make it,” said Frosty Anderson.  “He says he had chores.”

“We all know he’s afraid of the dark,” said Mike Murphy, lighting another candle.

“We shouldn’t make fun of him all the time,” reminded Blueberry, sitting next to Mike.  “It’s hard to get out of the house after dark to come here to an abandoned cellar in the middle of a junk yard.”

“Okay, we already know what Miss Morgan says about that,” said Tim.  “We have more important business tonight.”

“Worth getting grounded for a month for?” asked Mike.

“Yes.”

The children all leaned toward Tim as he sat conspiratorially in the middle of the candlelit cellar of the ruined house.  Everyone wanted to know what the big reveal was going to be, and Tim was loving it.

“So what’s the big deal?” asked Frosty.

“You know the project about getting kids to believe in fairies?” said Tim.

“Yeah,” said Mike and Frosty as Blueberry nodded.

“There is a secret reason that Miss Morgan needs us to do that project.”

Tim picked up a shoebox and placed it on his knees in front of him.  He slowly lifted the lid.

“So?  An empty shoebox?” sneered Mike.

“Oh, my!”  Blueberry’s eyes got as big as Tim could ever remember seeing them.

“This is Garriss,” said Tim simply, “he’s an elemental fire fairy.”

“I’m a Wisp,” croaked the little naked fire man.

“Cool!” gasped Frosty.

“He looks more like hot,” noted Mike.

“Is he real?” asked Blueberry stupidly.

“Don’t you believe your own eyes?” asked Tim.

“Don’t be rude to the beautiful young lady,” warned Garriss.

“Can I hold him?” Blueberry asked timidly.

“You’ll burn your hands,” said Mike.

“No, you won’t,” said Garriss.  “I am more than willing to be held by you, Pretty Miss.  And I promise, you can’t be hurt by my magical fire.”

Blueberry put out her open palm, and the little man formed of fire stepped gingerly into it.  The girl lifted him up in front of her face.

“You’re made of fire…  And you’re naked,” said Blueberry.

“I am a magical being,” said Garriss, “and I need you to believe I am real, for I will not continue to exist otherwise.”

“So,” said Mike, “you are only real if we believe in you?”

“Yes,”

“If I say I don’t believe in fairies, will you die?”

“Can you see me standing in front of you and still say you don’t believe?” asked Garriss.

“Good point,” answered Mike.

“If we are going to help the fairy people of Tellosia,” said Tim, “I had to show you they are real.  We can’t risk showing the real fairies to everyone, though.  We have to come up with ways to make people believe without actually showing them.”

“Why can’t we just show everybody?” said Mike.  “We could take a picture and show everybody!”

“Please, don’t do that,” pleaded Garriss.  “Someone might disbelieve their own eyes, and then I, and maybe others, would actually die.”

“Oh, we can’t let that happen!” cooed Blueberry.  “Garriss?  Will you let me draw your picture with colored pencils?”

“I would be honored, my lady.”

“This is all just too wonderful to be real,” Blueberry said.

Tim nodded in silence.  They would generate the belief that was needed,  Blueberry’s drawings would do it, if anything could.  That girl could really whip pencils around and make good art.

“We have to swear a Pirate oath,” said Tim.  “We all swear to make people believe and keep the real fairies safe from discovery and death.  If we fail, then may our human hearts shrivel up and we all die an untimely death.”

“I swear it,” said Blueberry.

“If Blue does,” said Mike, “then so do I.”

“Me too,” said Frosty.

“And you have my word on it too,” said Garriss.

Tim grinned an evil grin.  This was gonna be great.

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The Whole Enchilada (Though it’s not an enchilada, it’s a Paffooney)

I finished it in black and white.  I know it doesn’t make sense as a whole, but it is surrealism, and it is supposed to be cut up into separate parts, as I will show you later.

Background ab

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Pen and Ink Progress

Here is what the pen and ink background project looks like tonight before I start working on it.

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Background Work

You know that setting is a key to good fiction.  It must be as detailed and alive as the main characters.  It is necessary to good art as well.  I will be talking more about that as this Paffooney project unfolds.  I am concentrating on background art.  Here is step one… a tree on a hill.  This is the pen and ink on the original pencil drawing.  It is an extra-warty imaginary tree.

DSCN5330

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Things You Probably Ought to Know about Mickey

As Mickey’s go, the one who is writing this is a moderately interesting example of the breed.  Still, there are things you probably ought to be made aware of.  A sort of precautionary thing…

First of all, this particular Mickey is an Iowegian.  That means he comes from Iowa, the State where the tall corn grows.  It is a prime reason why his jokes are corny and his ears have been popped (oh, and he does actually have two, unlike the picture Paffooney where only one is showing).  His fur is not actually purple.  If anything now, it is mostly silver-gray.  But the Paffooney is a magical portrait, and purple is the color of magic.  He has a goofy, and sometimes fatal grin.  You may not be able to prove that he has ever actually grinned someone to death, but it is likely he could always dig somebody up.

Another irrefutable fact about this Mickey, unlike many many Mickeys, is that he used to actually be a public school teacher.  He taught the little buggers for thirty-one years, plus two years as a substitute teacher.  He did twenty-four of those years in middle school… twenty-three of those in one school in South Texas.  His mostly Hispanic students managed to teach him every bad word in Spanglish… err, Texican… err, Tex-Mex… or is it Taco Bell?  Anyway, they taught him every bad word except for the word for cooties… you know, piojos.  He learned that word from an old girl friend.

A despicable thing about him… (you know despicable, right?  It’s that word that Sylvester the cat always uses) is that he actually likes kids.  That’s just not normal for someone who teaches them.  Teachers are supposed to hate kids, aren’t they?  But he never did.  It is true that he yelled at them sometimes, but he never did that because he hated them.  He did that only for fun.  And he actually apologized to kids sometimes when they got into behavioral trouble, because he said it was the teacher’s fault if kids are bad, and, besides, the kids are so surprised by that, that they forget all about the behavior and can be flammoozled into acting good.

The last and most wicked thing you need to know about Mickey is that he cartoons up a storm sometimes.  He loves to draw everything that is wacky and weird.  He has more goofball colored pencil tricks than a Charles Shultz and a Dr. Seuss rolled together in a sticky lump with a George Herriman stuck on top in place of a cherry.  He steals ideas and techniques from other artists and steals jokes from comedians, undertakers, and random juvenile delinquents.  He also puts together lists of wacky oddball details that don’t quite fit together and weaves it into purple paisley prose (somewhere in this whole messy blog thing he has also defined purple paisley prose and how to make it… in case you were curious.)

So there you have it.  The Truth about Mickey.  The sordid, simpering, solitary facts about Mickey.  The straight poop.  (wait a minnit!  How did poop get there?  Not again!  I thought I had cured that!)

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Consequences of Art

zebra

This little picture Paffooney is a work that makes me sick.  Now, I don’t want to mislead you, but it I literally mean it makes me sick.  So let me explain quickly before I have to do something about the nausea.  I drew this from a black-and-white photo of a zebra on a day when I was seriously ill with the flu.  It took a good deal of concentration while having a headache and fever to draw the detailed, stripey form.  The stripes, the zig-zags, the cross-hatches, all conspired with the dizziness and the fever to permanently impress the feelings on my brain.  I can’t look at it now without feeling queasy.  So why am I posting it now?  Well, it shouldn’t have the same effect on you.  And I can post it and look at it now without feeling any worse because I am now sick with fever and possibly flu.  I hope you like this more than I do.

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Fantasia

Mickey

I learned a lot of what I know about cartooning by copying Disney characters.  Now, I know that this post could potentially get me into trouble, because  I am posting on a blog I use for marketing, an imitation Disney character, a very famous and very copyrighted character.  Disney has been known to sue school districts for showing Disney movies in class without expressed written permission.  They have become cruelly litigious since transforming from Uncle Walt’s Wonderful World of Color into an evil multi-national corporate media empire whose spokesperson is a mouse.  So I beg you to pardon my transgressions due to love and debt I have to the work in the title of this piece.  Consider this fan art, like the pictures I posted of the Phantom and Captain America (who is also now owned by Disney).

Fantasia is for me the Book of Life.

The movie starts with Bach’s masterpiece, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor This amazing piece reminds me of earliest childhood memories.  It begins with sound and the instruments that make it, becoming shapes and lines and movements and, eventually cloud forms.  It is the beginning of perception, like modern art itself, the raw energy and emerging forms that I began to perceive as an infant, but could not define or distinguish clearly.

Next comes  Nutcracker Suite by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.  This is the explorations of nature and the magic of existence as a mere child.  It uses Tchaikovsky’s sugar-plum ballet music to depict hours of play and learning and investigation and wonder.  In it I see myself as a young child, viewing all the color and beauty through wide eyes.

Then comes The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas.  In this piece, the child in me, like Mickey the apprentice, for the first time bites off more than I could chew.  I overstep my protective boundaries and get myself into a serious fix that has to be undone by the parent stepping in at the end, and not only fixing it, but delivering the consequences to my ignorant behind with a broom.  Of course, we all know I will do it again.  Every child does.  But next time I will get it right.

This is followed by Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky.  Here the child is child no longer.  I watch the amoeba become dinosaurs to harsh and dissonant music.  I learn about the world, growing and evolving, finding out that life is full of hard lessons.  Life and Death play out there struggle, and the learning concludes when you reached the parched and hopeless climax, the realization that everything, no matter how big or powerful, ends in death and failure.  Dust returns to dust.

The film then blossoms into The Pastoral Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven.  This mythical landscape of cute cherubs and satyrs, bare-breasted centaurettes, and Greek Gods rendered in pastel hues represents the blooming of romance, lust, and love.  There is celebration, complete with Dionysus and his invention, wine.  There is courtship, attraction, and bonding.  When the cherubs pull the curtain closed on the centaur couple, we also know what is happening behind the curtain even if it weren’t for the cherub whose butt becomes a red heart.  And, of course, there is a great storm that comes along, both in the pastoral music and the action of the cartoon, representing the volatility and strife that occurs when we dare to love another.  It does, however, subside for life to continue refreshed.

Disney centaur 2

The next piece is  Dance of the Hours by Amilcare Ponchielli.  This comedy of ballerina ostriches and hippos, bubble-dancing elephants, and aggressively dancing gators, is the domestic, married life.  It is a comedy of graceful awkwardness, beauty and humor rolled into the same cake and cooked with irony and wit.  And, of course, just like real life, everything is eventually carried away by the wind… until the next dance.

And finally, Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky and Ave Maria by Franz Schubert is the end of life.  First comes the pain and suffering of death, ruled over by Chernabog the Devil.  He commands the torture and heartless ritual that I am subject to even now, in the twilight of life.  The flesh and the bones yield to his trans-formative whims.  We must all dance to his music until the striking of dawn.  Then he is defeated and the spirit soars, free of body and definable form to the rousing strains of Ave Maria.  We journey through the cathedral forest towards the everlasting light, and the movie, like my life, will be done.  But I do not despair, because life, like the movie itself, can be endlessly replayed and is eternal.

I was not able to see this movie for the first time until college, attending a screening at Iowa State.  When it came out on VHS in the 80’s, I bought two, one to keep and store safely, unopened, and one to watch until it fell apart.  I also bought the DVD when it came out with Fantasia 2000.  I cannot count how many times I have seen this movie.  I even showed it to my classes as I was about to retire, and didn’t secure written permission.  But it was only this week, feeling ill and terribly mortal again that I realized… Fantasia tells the story of my life.

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Bug People

DSCN5326 Sometimes I like to bug people.  Wait, is that a pun?  Was it punny?  Maybe puny?  Bugs are puny.  I like bugs.  I am constantly making up names for them.  Bugs are people too… Aren’t they?  These are bug people.  One is a beetle who is not John Lennon.  Another is a moth who would rather be a butterfly.  There is a little ladybug.  And the bug giving out the Koolaid is Billy Bugbright.  Have you ever seen Hoppity Goes to Town?  It’s a Max Fleischer feature-length cartoon from 1941.  Here’s a link; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZQhZkee5LA Okay, enough about bugs… I am going a little bit buggy.

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Nerds… by any other name!

This is an essay from 2006 that I dug up to make more fun of nerds (which can be considered self-referential humor).

A while back I had the misfortune to write an essay that I called a Bestiary for the Modern Classroom.  I delineated the nonsense as if it were more than the half-disturbed ravings of a burned-out junior-highschool English teacher, something like the wit and wisdom gleaned from a twenty-four year sentence to the educational gulag of our time.  I told you about the Pepsi girls, Snarks, and Invisible Kids.  I deliberately ignored an entire wing of the monkey house by not breaking down for you the tremendously terrible and totally trigonometric totality of the modern Nerd.
Urkel    DSCN5154

When I drew this particular nerd cartoon, I am a cartoonist, by the way, Steven Q. Urkel still strutted and polka-ed his way across the TV screen in the 80’s sitcom, Family Matters.  I fear nerds are still pretty much the same.  I will have to admit, I will probably also be accused of being a Nerd, and though I do love cheese and polka music and Star Trek… I AM NOT A NERD!  That second Paffooney is NOT a self-portrait, though I have to admit I do grin just like that, and wear glasses, and… but enough of that!
In my previous article, I made the most heinous mistake of mentioning that there were Gomers lurking in the classroom.  Well, GooooOlleee, everybody seemed to think that that meant a clueless hayseed from the back hills who went to and fell in love with the Marine Corps.  Do you remember Gomer Pyle, USMC?  Yeah, that make-believe soldier that made Sergeant Carter’s life a living heckfire during endless training sessions while real marines were getting cut to pieces by Russian-made weapons in the rice paddies of Viet Nam?  The rube part of that story, nor the military part are neither one of them the part that makes a Gomer a Gomer.  It is entirely the idiot-savant part.  Remember Gomer’s ability to burst into song and solve the problems of the whole camp with a beautiful basso rendition of “Oh, My Papa”?  Gomers are all like that.  They are nerds who can’t follow directions, get everything wrong in a Steve Urkel, “Did I do that?” sort of way, and who are two earnestly sweet and silly to ever be mad at.  They also have that one unmatchable talent hidden somewhere inside that they can whip out without warning and melt the hearts of every LuAnn in the crowd.  It isn’t necessarily a singing talent.  Young Master Victory Brown was a hip-hop wannabe who couldn’t get the attention of a decent cop by blowing up the Chemistry lab, but who could dance like a wild man.  Everything went against the boy, it seemed, except when a professional singer like Patsy Torres came to play and sing in the high school gym for Red Ribbon Anti-Drug Week.  Young Vic got up on that stage and started dancing.  Ordinarily, the performer’s bodyguards would’ve had a punk like that in chains before the song was over, but he was so enthusiastic and downright good, that Patsy Torres was wowed and let him stay.  He danced so hard he executed a perfect back-flip off that stage and into the audience, where he landed on his feet like a cat and kept right on dancing like he meant to do that all along.  You know what?  I believe he really did mean to bust that move.  And man, did he ever bust it!  Gomers can excel in math, chess, theater-arts, drawing and painting, sewing, singing, and practically anything else that could ever be that one miraculous talent that lets them strut and fret for hour upon that stage.  Victor would be offended to hear it, but he was a Gomer through and through.
Goths as a subspecies of nerd are worrisome at best.  Girls and boys, though mostly girls for some strange reason, who wear spiked dog collars like Droopy’s enemy Spike in the old Tex Avery masterpieces, and all look like they must surely belong to Bela Lugosi’s fan club with their black clothes and black lipstick and eyeliner (even on the…No! I mean especially on the… boys) and their notebooks scrawled with death’s head symbols and Marilyn Manson stickers are all under the mysteriously medieval label of Goth.  Now where did this nonsense ever start?  I will admit that I was once at a midnight screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I did briefly admire the poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud in College, but I wouldn’t be caught dead pasting my hair down with hair gel just to show off my Eddie Munster widow’s peak, and I would never let anyone read my gloomy Death Poems and Devil Poems from the late 70’s, let alone paste them on MySpace or Xanga (Read that now as WordPress) billboards.  I am mortified by the obsession with mortality displayed by the average Goth.  Did they not hear Kevin McCarthy’s warning about the pod people?  Did they never fear the bite of Barnabas Collins because it would make them tainted and like him?   Whether the whole Goth scene is dying or not, I have to regretfully report, there was a girl last week at Ted Polk Middle School wearing her eye-liner like a tribute to Alice Cooper.  The dramatically dying and dreary undead are still ironically alive in the teenage Goth.
That leaves only Trekkie Techies to complete my bestiary.  And you will undoubtedly agree with me that they have been around since the 1950’s.  In the 1970’s we called them the “Audio-visual Club.”  Yes they were the ones that strange-old Mr. Hickenlooper would get to run his eighth grade social studies film backwards to fill the remainder of a period.  He somehow thought that seeing the cannon fire off of the Battleship Missouri blowing back into the barrels in black and white newsreel footage was the height of humor.  Mr. Hickenlooper never truly realized that he was the only one laughing at his jokes.  The rest of us laughed at how he was laughing at his own jokes.  In other words, we were not laughing WITH him, we were laughing AT him.  The Big Hick was himself a nerd, probably of the subclass known as a Trekkie Techie.  Yes, they watched Star Trek just as I watched Star Trek.  But they were also the ones who could actually explain to you how a warp drive worked, and fantasized about kissing Uhura as a Klingon Captain.  You probably won’t believe it, but Trekkie Techies are still around and going strong.  Now, instead of 35mm film and tape recorders, they work with I-pods, Dell Computers, and Flash Drives, but they are still making technology dance to their own different drum.  Instead of Captain Kirk and the Vulcan Death Grip, they talk about Jackson’s version of Frodo, the other Jackson’s Master Mace Windu, and how Marv whacked ’em all in Sin City, but they are still living in their own little fantasy worlds and talking Klingon and Huttese.  Don’t get me wrong.  I know Bill Gates was one, and Bill Clinton was another, and probably Obama is too(or is that O’bama? he doesn’t look Irish?), and all three of them probably would get a laugh out of ionizing George W. Bush’s underpants, but it will never be cool to be a Techie Trekkie.  The question will undoubtedly arise, since I like Star Trek and Star Wars and Star Anything, am I a Techie Trekkie too?  Well… “May the Force Be With You!”
So now my little bestiary is complete with all the major species of anniemule in the middle school classroom.  Do you think I left any out?  No doubt.  There are more kinds of human beings in middle schools than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.  (Yeah, isn’t there a kind of Snark who always misquotes Shakespeare to keep us entertained?)

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My Latest Novel

I sent this novel to the publisher during the October submission window last night.  I am hoping it will get published and add to my published catalog.  Superchicken was my nickname in high school, so this one is a little autobiographical.  This is also the one where a boy is tricked into going camping with a girl who has a crush on him at a nudist camp.  So it should be noted that some things in this story really happened.  Still this young adult novel is mostly funny, a little serious, and a lot of fantasy.

superchick_novel Supe n Sherry_n

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