Don’t make the mistake of thinking I have any earthly idea where writing comes from or how it began. I am only talking personal history here, nothing grander or more meaningful. This post is only self-referential hoo-haw, which is a fancy way of interpreting “conceited crap”.
So, the truth is, I am writing about Charles Dickens because he is the author I most want to become. True, I rant on and on about Twain and his humor. And a good deal of my artwork owes everything to Disney, but everything I am good at in writing is based on Dickens.
The first actual Dickens novel that I read was accomplished during my extended illness as a high school sophomore. I read in bed, both at home and in the hospital, from my library copy of The Old Curiosity Shop. I was enthralled by the journey and subsequent tragedy of Little Nell. I thoroughly loathed the villain Daniel Quilp and was roundly thrilled by his well-deserved fatal comeuppance. It was my first encounter with the master of characters. I followed that reading with a biography of Dickens that revealed to me for the first time that his characters were based on real people. Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield was actually Dickens’ own father. Little Nell was the cousin he dearly loved who died in his arms. The crafty Fagin was a caricature of a well-known fence named Soloman, a Jew of infamous reputation, but not without his redeeming quality of caring for the orphaned poor. So it is that I have chosen to make my silly stories about real people in much the same way Dickens did. If you are now worried that since you know me, you may end up in my books, never fear. I change names and splice characters together. You will have to make an effort to recognize yourself. And, besides, nobody reads my books anyway.
I also like the way Dickens uses young characters and follows them over time as they grow and change. Oliver Twist was the first child protagonist in English literature. David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and Pip in Great Expectations are also like that. David Copperfield, in fact, is Chuck’s own fictionalized self. I fully intend to do the same. It is the reason my books fall into the Young Adult category. I also intend to employ the same kind of gentle, innocent humor that Dickens used. I mean to portray things that are funny in a disarming, absurdist way rather than resorting to attack humor and bad words.
There it is, then, my tribute to Charles Dickens, a writer who makes me be who I am and write what I write. I am not supposed to do Christmas posts because of my avowed religion, but you can consider this to be as close as I can come. The author of A Christmas Carol… it doesn’t get much more Christmassy than that.
I admit to using AI art programs to help me create artwork. But I am not letting AI generate drawings for me. I use AI to add effects and details that my arthritic hands can no longer create. I have been drawing blue-skinned Nebulons for forty years. This picture is my drawing even though the AI finished it (except for the mouth and nose, which I had to redraw to finish this.) In fact, I drew and redrew this particular picture about ten times, something I can do digitally that ink and colored pencil on paper doesn’t allow me to do. One shot is all you get at the process the old way of doing it, unless you spend hours pixel editing with Photoshop. So, I am finished apologizing for the shortcuts I have been taking to make art since I took up digital tools. I get to call myself an artist no matter how offended other artists are becoming with the use of the AI crutches I take advantage of.
I might point out that whatever copyright violations are being done by AI art programs, that is not what I am doing. I am using digital art tools and an AI app that I am feeding my own artwork into. And the corrective decisions are made by me. I am drawing well more than 90 percent of the drawings myself.
But I don’t know why I keep feeling like I have to defend what I am doing. I have been drawing and redrawing and doing art for at least 62 years. And I have never made any substantial amounts of money for anything creative I have done outside of a classroom where I was the teacher.
Why do I worry about my own making of art anyway? I am nobody. Nobody will ever hang any of my work in a gallery. I have never been a commercial artist. I have only been paid a pittance for published cartoons a few times, and royalties for novels and essays a few times more. It never bothered me when I was teaching. I got the feedback I needed from students as I showed them the processes and techniques of being both a good reader and a good writer. I knew from them that my writing abilities were good and were teachable. I had student writers who won writing contests. I took on State tests and achieved writing scores for entire grade levels that were better than the English departments of the small towns around ours. I got real praise from more than one superintendent. I was an English department head and a Gifted Program coordinator. If I ever was somebody, it was then… doing that.
They told me in writing classes at both Iowa State and the University of Iowa that I would probably one day be a published author, and that I was a talented writer with considerable skill. Well, I’m a self-published author now. One that practically nobody reads. But the ones that do read my books seem mostly to like them, or hate them for spurious reasons in two cases. And I guess that is good enough. Good writers in the past have been ignored until after they were gone. I may remain ignored forever. But the important thing is that my art and my writing exist. For now. And maybe in people’s memories too for a while after that. Art needs to exist for its own sake, Its own secret purposes. And it was only my place to create them, not follow them to their ultimate purpose.
Whatever. I am nobody. And that’s okay. Nobody is really more than that in the long run.
I began this post with a very excellent video that you probably will not watch, but I found it fascinating and it, in fact, inspired everything I want to talk about in this post. It is about the AI art programs that are running amok in the art world. I am, after all, an artist. Specifically, I am a storyteller and cartoonist. I know how to draw. I can prove it.
Here’s the proof. This is an original oil painting that I did in the 1980s. The only tools that I used to create this picture are a set of oil colors in tubes, a painter’s pallet, three different sizes of sable brushes, a pencil, and a magazine picture of a Vietnamese boy’s face. This was done at the height of my skills as an artist. But I also have to admit that I was diagnosed with arthritis in 1974 after painting the family home’s exterior. Now, 49 years later, the length of time the disease has been gnawing at my joints, I don’t quite have the same sophistication and ability as an artist, a creator of images. That is why digital art tools have been such a boon to me.
This is a colored pencil drawing I created in the 1990s. It is modeled on a young Hispanic boy who lived in the same apartment complex as I did. He was not green. At least I don’t think my color blindness was that bad back then.
I loaded the original drawing into the Drawing Pad digital art program. I put a layer on top of it in my touchscreen phone. I then basically traced the original drawing using the digital stylus that I bought to use in place of a pencil, pen, or paintbrush. I used it in pen mode first to draw the outline. You can see how much it was simplified. This made it easier to do on the small screen I had available on the phone despite my arthritis. I then used the stylus in watercolor paintbrush mode to color in the face and hair. I changed the eye color so I could do the eyes more consistently with a manga-cartoon style of softening levels of color. It gives it a more liquid and realistic look.
So far, I have shown you proof that I can draw well even now with the arthritis affecting my fingers.
Now let’s talk about the Artificial Intelligence programs that have been released into the internet to eventually take away the rulership of this planet and keep us monkey-people in zoos for the amusement of the computerized mega minds that will replace us as the dominant force of civilization on this planet.
AI art programs like the infamous Dall-E programs allow you to write a short description of the artwork you want to see, and the program generates something randomly to fit your descriptors. It pulls from a database scraped from the internet at large, including all the artwork I have posted here on my blog, Instagram, and Pinterest, and adds it all to a dataset that allows it to recognize, interpret, and produce something that conforms to what you have asked for even though it pays no artist any royalties or user fees for drawing from other artists’ artworks.
I promise I will never use an AI program to do that. If you see my name on any artwork like that, then I am dead and being impersonated by an AI entity.
Here is the only way I use AI to aid me in the making of artwork. It is a program called AI Mirror. You give it a photo or a png of an artwork and it redraws it in a specified style.
This is an artwork that I did earlier this year in colored pencil. I was not satisfied with my arthritis-impaired ability on this project. The eyes were too owlish and dark. The lips are too dark and thick. But you can’t erase colored pencils and ink on paper and fix things as easily as you can digitally on a touch screen. So, I used the AI Mirror to correct it.
I used the AI Mirror to fix it in stages like this, simplifying and redrawing it like this first. And then advancing it to this.
This is the finished project, simplified and made more elegant with digital tools.
You can argue that my final product is not better than the colored pencil original. But I like the fact that the AI and the digital tools allowed me to correct what I didn’t like.
The problem with AI art programs, which probably won’t be the ones that outsmart and replace humanity, is that they do so much for you that you are no longer an artist if you use them. So, I guess that I am saying I think that I am an artist, however wrongly, while using these programs because I put the work in both before and after using the AI application. My fear is since nobody sees me as an artist or hears me as a writer anyway, that my art and my stories will be snowed under a mountain of AI generated schlock that is certainly no better than my schlock, and inferior to my best stuff.
I love the fact that I can so easily turn old pen-and-ink drawings like this doodle into a digital art masterpiece. All I had to do is trace the old drawing on the touchscreen with the digital tools available to me now. My electronic stylus and the free drawing app make re-inking the old drawing like a painting. The brush, line, or effect that you lay on the old drawing takes only a swish of the stylus. And it is so much cleaner and more stylish than the old way of inking a pencil drawing with a ballpoint pen.
Take for instance this digital drawing called “The Skinny Dipper.” It begins as a simple drawing filled with color. And then you can layer details over and under, blend in more colors, shapes, and shadows. It can become much more detailed and realistic. I used a photographic background under it, and then continued to make it an original drawing by painting over both the figure and every detail of the background.
And it didn’t stop there. I gave the boy, or possibly girl, a scuba suit to preserve his or her modesty and allow a deeper dive.
I thought that this silly poem needed to be re-posted because school is ending. The need for silliness is absolutely imperative. I also need to throw a few mooses… er… moosei… er… meese? How do you pluralize the word moose?
Life is as Hard as Bowling with a Moose (A Poem)
Life is like Moose Bowling, Because… In order to knock over all the pins, And win… You have to learn HOW TO THROW A MOOSE!
As the days count down, I have had to exercise my moose-throwing muscles more and more. Today I have five days left in my teaching career. So many precious kids I have to give up and never see again… So many teachers will tell you that every year the kids are getting worse and worse, and their attitudes are turning more sour, disrespectful, and violent. But those teachers don’t know the secret. You have to throw a moose or two at the problem. Real discipline is hard work. Harder than demanding that kids sit in rows and be silent… heads down and pens scratching away. You have to actually talk to kids and learn who they are… what they feel is important… what their problems are, and what they want you to do about them. You have to be honest, give them a hook or two to draw them into the whole learning thing. You have to actually care.
So, I do. I care. And I let them talk. It’s a moose that has to be tossed.
The comment was made this morning that you have to keep them working right up until the end of the year. Doing no formal lessons in class is actually a lot harder and more risky than continuing to plod through the textbook. But in five more days there are no more classes, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks… school’s out forever. I haven’t done any lessons since two weeks ago. Grades are in the gradebook. I have been showing kids my favorite movies. Especially movies from the eighties. (Truthfully, I have not been well enough to actually teach. My body aches and I can’t breathe very well) I have been talking to kids about those movies… what they think about them, and what they think about life in general. Kids are telling me they are worried about my poor health. They say they are interested in my books and my writing, even though they don’t actually read just for pleasure and will never buy what I write… or even look at this blog. They tell me about their troubles, their hopes and dreams, their most significant relationships, and they tell me that they will miss me next year. Five days… will I make it through without breaking into tears? No, I won’t. I may not even try. That’s one moose too heavy to throw.
But I have no regrets. I have touched more than two thousand five hundred lives (a pretty close estimate… I don’t have a good enough memory to actually count.) They have touched my life in return. No other thing I could have done with my life would ever mean as much. Doctors save lives, but teachers shape real people. So what does it all mean? I mean, really? It means I have thrown a lot of mooses… er… moosei… er… well, you know what I mean. And if my arms are growing weary, then it is for a very good reason.
My biggest regret as a cartoonist and waster of art supplies is the fact that I am not the world’s best portrait artist. I can only rarely make a work of art look like a real person. Usually the subject has to to be a person I love or care deeply about. This 1983 picture of Ruben looks very like him to me, though he probably wouldn’t recognize himself here as the 8th grader who told me in the fall of 1981 that I was his favorite teacher. That admission on his part kept me from quitting and failing as a first year teacher overwhelmed by the challenges of a poor school district in deep South Texas.
My Great Grandma Hinckley was really great.
My great grandmother on my mother’s side passed away as the 1970’s came to an end. I tried to immortalize her with a work of art. I drew the sketch above to make a painting of her. All my relatives were amazed at the picture. They loved it immensely. I gave the painting to my Grandma Aldrich, her second eldest daughter. And it got put away in a closet at the farmhouse. It made my grandma too sad to look at every day. So the actual painting is still in a closet in Iowa.
There were, of course, numerous students that made my life a living heck, especially during my early years as a teacher. But I was one of those unusual teachers (possibly insane teachers) who learned to love the bad kids. Love/hate relationships tend to endure in your memory almost as long as the loving ones. I was always able to pull the good out of certain kids… at least in portraits of them.
When kids pose for pictures, they are not usually patient enough to sit for a portrait artist. I learned early on to work from photographs, though it has the disadvantage of being only two-dimensional. Sometimes you have to cartoonify the subject to get the real essence of the person you are capturing in artiness.
But I can’t get to the point of this essay without acknowledging the fact that any artist who tries to make a portrait, is not a camera. The artist has to put down on paper or canvas what he sees in his own head. That means the work of art is filtered through the artist’s goofy brain and is transformed by all his quirks and abnormalities. Therefore any work of art, including a portrait that looks like its subject, is really a picture of the artist himself. So, I guess I owe you some self portraits to compare.
I have rather regularly been revising and editing old writing. One thing I have discovered is that I am capable of the most gawd-awful convoluted sentences filled with mangled metaphors and ideas that can only be followed while doing mental back-flips or managing miracles of interpretation. That last sentence is a perfect example of purple paisley prose. Paisley, in case you didn’t know this, is a printed pattern on clothing or other cloth that makes an intricate design out of the basic twisted teardrop shape borrowed from Persian art. The basic motif, the teardrop shape, is a leaf or vegetable design often referred to as the Persian pickle. I write like that. You can pick out the Persian pickles in this very paragraph. Alliterations, mangled metaphors, rhyming words, sound patterns, the occasional literary allusion, personification, bungles, jungles, and junk. “How can you actually write like that?” you ask. Easy. I think like that.
To make a point about mangled metaphors, let me visit a couple of recent scenes in novels I have been working on;
From The Bicycle Wheel Genius; page 189
Mike Murphy and Frosty Anderson sat at the kitchen table eating a batch of Orben’s pancakes, the twentieth try at pancakes, and nearly edible. Mike could eat anything with maple syrup on it… well, maybe not dog poop, but these were slightly better than dog poop.
From The Magical Miss Morgan; page 7
Blue looked at Mike and grinned. It was an impish and fully disarming grin. It made Mike do whatever Blue said, even being willing to eat a lump of dog poop if she asked him to, though she would never ask him to.
So, here’s the thing. Why is there a repetition of the dog-poop-eating metaphor? In one case it is Mike Murphy expressing in metaphorical terms his love of maple syrup. In the other, it is Mike Murphy expressing his love of Blueberry Bates’ dimpled grin. He is a somewhat unique character, but why would anybody associate love with eating dog poop? I don’t know. I just wrote the dang things.
I like to take a convoluted plot and complicate it with complex sentences and numerous running gags, with a seasoned-sauce of mangled metaphors poured on top like gravy. I will use sentences like this either to make you laugh, or give you a headache. I’m almost sure it is one of those. So if you have gotten this far in this post without a headache, then I guess it must be funny.
Catch a Falling Star 