Tag Archives: drawing
Superchicken
Today I finished the re-write on my novel Superchicken, I have only been working on it since 1988. The title came from my high school nickname. I was a nerd with the ability to play tackle football to a level that impressed all the guys who were bigger and stronger than me. It became my superhero name. So I put it into a book that is filled with stories within stories. Many of the stories are true. Some are just big goofy lies. I hope to make people laugh a little with it. I hope people are not offended a lot. But if I polish it any more than it is, I will have polished holes clear through it
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The signature on the portrait of the Superchicken is simply my name spelled backwards.
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The Island Girl
When I was yet a boy in high school, I had a dream that seemed so real. I knew that one day it would come true. It was a dream of an island in the Pacific Ocean and an exotic island girl who was as intrigued by me as I was by her. I began drawing pictures of it. I don’t have the first pictures I drew any more, but here is one from college, in 1979,
As time went on, and I became a teacher, I had more dreams of who she might be and what it might mean. I met her in real life while teaching in South Texas. We were married and have three kids. The next Paffooney is from 1995.
No matter what else it might mean, it proves to me that dreams can come true. In fact, I believe that through dreams we can experience the future because we can dream outside of time. Reality is a whole, and perceiving it as a straight line from the past, through the present, into the future is only one perspective of the whole thing.
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The Girl With the Red Bird
This is a Paffooney I have had in my portfolio for many years. Is it a miracle that it looks so much like my daughter the Princess? Yes! Most definitely. I drew this before I got married, more than twenty years ago. Yet, it looks so much like the Princess that my flabber is completely gasted.
June 29, 2014 · 6:49 pm
Space Cowboys, the Kid Variety
Here are two more deadly mutant kid ninjas from Aeroquest. When the Pan Galactican Union fell to the mysterious space invaders known as the Scondians, these two mutant boys were among the flood of refugees who escaped to the Human Imperium. Gyro son of Jor is a Nebulon. That means he is a member of an inter-stellar race whose humanity is in question. His skin is blue and highly radiation resistant. On top of his Nebulon qualities, he is a Psion Trans-muter who can mentally alter molecules, sometimes even fusing simple atoms into more complex ones. He is also very inventive. He can change a simple computer into a mini-attack-bot, a computer into a video game machine, or a vehicle into video game machine… well, he’s a teenager, so virtually anything can become a video game machine. He laughs easily, even at things that aren’t funny, and doesn’t mind when others call him a Space Smurf, because he doesn’t know what that means. Billy Iowa is his best friend and fellow survivor. If Gyro’s family hadn’t rescued Billy from Scondian captivity, he would’ve remained on Pan Galactica as a laboratory test subject. Unlike many of the Pan Galactican Space Cowboys, he is not prejudiced against Nebulons. In fact, as an orphan, he looks at them more as family than as an inferior race. His Psion power is Clairvoyance, allowing him to see times and places where he is not present, even to the extent that he can accurately predict the future. He’s a better karate and kung fu student than Gyro, but as student ninjas go, all the rest of his dojo can beat the crap out of him. So, these two Space Cowboys, both boys, provide a lot of the comedy relief in the Aero Dojo. They are of course, not nearly as dangerous as the girls are, but don’t insult them never-the-less. Billy can tell you how you will die, and Gyro will make unbelievably corny jokes about it.
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Taffy King, Deadly Mutant Teenage Lizard-Girl Ninja From Outer Space
I told you about Mai Ling the other day. This is her classmate, her BFF, and her fellow student ninja from the planet Gaijin in the 53rd Century. Unlike Mai, Taffy is royalty. She is a former princess of the planet Mingo, her family being supplanted and exiled by the Nefarious Emperor Mong. Like all Mingoans, she is a member of the Fusion Race. They are people scientifically engineered to be half Earth human and half Galtorrian reptilian humanoid. She has lovely green eyes, vertically slitted, with the look of a cobra about them. She is just as deadly as her eyes make her seem. Her Psion power is basically telekinesis, the same as Mai Ling’s power, but she uses it in a very different fashion. Taffy likes to move and manipulate tiny objects in mass. She shapes things out of sand, water droplets, smoke, living wasps, or bees. She can trap you withing a sarcophagus made of sand with no breathing holes. She can dress you in a suit of stinging wasps. On top of that, she has ninja skills that allow her to slice and dice you with blades or even kill you with her bare hands. She’s not actually vain, but you should never tell her that her hair is mussed or that her clothing isn’t perfectly in style. She has killed bozos like us for less.
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Mai Ling, Deadly Mutant Little Girl Ninja From Outer Space
One must always be careful of the most deadly creatures to be found in the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy. That’s why it is good to note that one of the most deadly creatures, which is also one of the most necessary to avoid, is the teenage girl just entering the mixed blessings of puberty. Mai Ling, pictured in this Aeroquest Science Fiction Public Service Warning Poster, is a particularly lethal specimen of just such a creature. At about thirteen years of age, she is possessed of not only deadly ninja skills, trained to fatal perfection, but also telekinetic Psion mutant skills. She can use her telekinesis to propel weapons in ways that weapons were never meant to be propelled at speeds of up to GOLLY GEE WOO-WOO WOW THAT WAS FAST!!! If she shoots at you with the slug-thrower pistol she often carries, you are not only merely dead, but literally most sincerely dead because even if she misses you, she can redirect the bullet into whichever vital organ she wishes, and being the age she is, that probably means something in the highly sensitive and highly embarrassing personal middle area. She can also bang you dead pretty effectively with any stone she decides to pick up and fling. Her left arm is sheathed in accelerating electro-magnetic Gauss-effect armor that will turn a stone into faster-than-the-speed-of-sound projectile capable of blasting its way through the walls of the boys’ shower room. You dare not cross her. Don’t challenge her authority. And, for goodness sake, don’t make comments on handsome young members of boy bands, because you never ever can anticipate which one she will be in love with this week… er… today… er… this minute.
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Creepy Times, the Third Chapter
The picture is called “My Galatea” after the myth of Pygmalion. I drew it at a time when I was working on the Snow Babies character of Valerie Clarke. She was my creation, made up of my daughter the Princess, a girl I had a crush on in 6th grade, and a very strange part of my own psyche that is essentially female. Sometimes things come together in such a fashion that the creation becomes more real than what I know as reality. Have you ever created something that was so perfect that you fell in love with it? It is a very strange feeling. It doesn’t create happiness. It makes you feel regret that what should be real is only fantasy. It makes you feel longing for something that you know you simply cannot have. It makes you feel creepy, like you’ve done something wrong. You have stolen bits of other people’s lives and put them together, made them live in a new form, the whole Frankenstein’s monster sort of thing. The evil abides in those things that you could never foresee as problems. The torches are lit, the pitchforks come out, and chaos ensues.
Falconet’s sculpture of Pygmalion (1763)
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Biblical Proportions
This picture was a 1980’s attempt to copy the skin tones in the works of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. I have always admired their ability to create luminous tanned skin and vibrant character colors. I also intended to turn this into an oil painting of young David the shepherd playing and singing for King Saul. My skills were not up to the task at the time, but I find this goofy composition interesting never the less. 
June 20, 2014 · 4:24 pm
Colored Pencil Magic
I left high school determined to become a wizard. I know how foolish that sounds. The beginning of wisdom is learning how big a fool I naturally am. So, having learned that I am a little fool (after years of humbling experience I know better than to call myself big), I had to pursue arcane knowledge and magic spells to become a wizard. I began to experiment with all kinds of ideas and all sorts of media. But it was the humble colored pencil where I discovered the most arcane power.
Let me tell you about how I cast a recent magic spell.
As with any wizard work, it begins with a book, a tome of significance discovered in the course of a book-finding quest. It was a book that I found in a Goodwill store, an antique book that describes in children’s book form how an archeologist uncovered the life and ultimate demise of a place in the distant past called Pueblo Bonito.
I learned about the place and the people, especially the children because, after all, that’s who the book was written for. So, the next step was to pull together the puzzle pieces I needed for a little bit of Paffooney magic. Paffooney, you may recall, is a magical made-up nonsense word useful for artistic incantations. I consulted a book that I myself created, a scrapbook of poems, snippets, and visual ideas. I call it Rage after the Dylan Thomas poem about raging against the dying of the light. It is full of scraps and pictures that I can use as models.
I sketched out the plan in light pencil, too light to really pick up in the photo. When I begin the detail work, I take it area by area, starting with the most important piece, the primary figure’s face.
As I moved along, I had to color in the primary figure first trying to carefully create a light-source pattern mostly consistent with my model. It is coming from near-noonday sun shining down into the Pueblo from the top right of the frame.
I discovered when it was too late that I missed the proper proportion on the right arm. I gave the poor girl a Popeye arm. But she will just have to live with the deformity. At least I didn’t goof as badly as Victor Frankenstein did on his creation.
The figure needed to be completed first since the the light patterns in the background would have to be keyed to it in a way that keeps those elements pushed back into the depths of the picture.
The background will contain three more figures, the two child figures will be more obscured than the main figure and far less detailed. The adult figure will be a mere shadow in the darkness of the Pueblo walls. A touch of blue sky will finish it all and give it primary completeness (red, yellow, and blue in a picture make it feel complete because these are the primary colors of paint).
I am left with the completed spell, a Paffooney I call “Pueblo Bonito”. I signed my name backwards, dated it, and now it is time to look at the finished spell and let its gentle magic work on my soul.
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Catch a Falling Star 