Tag Archives: Saturday Art Day
Making Faces for Art Day
Where Portraits Come From
I painted this picture in the 1980’s because this boy was a very attractive little Asian-American child and I wanted to paint a picture of him.
But it became something else when I added the soldier’s helmet with the bullet hole in it.
It was the closest thing I ever did to something politically controversial. I was accused of making an anti-war picture… in Texas where you don’t disrespect a soldier. And the Viet Nam Conflict was still very much on people’s minds in the 80’s.
This is a Dickensian illustration. Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim. The boy was actually the son of a school secretary and grandson of a math teacher. Bob was modeled after a stand-up comic that I had a magazine picture of.
This reptilian fellow appeared in my dreams when I was twelve. He didn’t actually pose for me. I used a National Geographic picture to help me get the head right.
Grade-school me was the model for this one. I made it from an old school picture.
This is actually a portrait of Manuel. He was a seventh grader in 1984. Seventh Grade Language Arts, A-minus student and excellent oral reader.
This sweet child was actually a green-eyed brunette and holding a tub of autumn leaves in the original photograph.
There’s a lot of portraits in this picture. They are all from photographs, except for three imaginary faces. Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan were both in a black-and-white photo from The Kid. And the skeleton was made of plastic.
This is Black Timothy, dressed all in red. This is pretty close to what he actually looks like. Of course, he’s imaginary.
The Truth Behind Mickey’s Vision
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Celebration, Old Art Revisited
These are some of my favorite drawings from the past.
You may have noticed that my blog is about surrealist art, fantasy fiction for young adults, and a somewhat strange idea of what humor is all about.
Filed under announcement, artwork, blog posting, Paffooney
Just Because I Like That Picture
It’s true. You have seen these multiple times before. They are some of my favorite drawings , paintings, and pictures.
You may not agree that these are my best work. That isn’t why I included them. These are pictures I simply like, and I could’ve added another hundred or so easily.
Mickey Plays with Pictures and Paint
Once I was finally able to scan pictures again, I did some scanning of old pictures that only got the camera treatment before on my blog.
But why stop a drawing at just the pen and ink, when there is potential for so much more?
So, I took the Microsoft generic paint program and my generic photo editor to not only this pen and ink of the Jungle Princess, but a few other pictures as well.
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This is what she looks like after being attacked with color by my arthritic old hands. (There was a day when I could have handled intricate details more cleverly, but that was many, many days ago.
Anyway, I have added new dimensions to Leopard Girrrl with color.
Now I need to add more complications to the basic story of the picture.
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Here is an older pen and ink.
This is Dorin Dobbs, one of the dueling plotlines’ protagonists from the novel Catch a Falling Star.
But, of course, Dorin is a more complex character than this old black and white.
So, color needs to be added.
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I had this one actually already painted in…
But in order to use it in this project, I needed to enlarge it to make it fit into the other picture.
Making this unlikely pair work together in a story is one of the challenges of doing surrealist stories. They have to be grounded in realism, but also bring jarringly different things together. Like the Jungle Princess going on an adventure with Norwall’s Lying King.
But, putting these two together is still not enough. Let’s try some other things.
The Jungle Princess together with Tomboy Dilsey Murphy is an unusual pairing.
Or what about the blue faun from Laughing Blue?
Or even Annette Funicello?
Ridiculous, I know. But don’t they look like satin sofa paintings?
And how surreal is that?
Surreal Self-Portraits
What you see is basically me.
It is said by somebody who wasn’t basically me that any time an artist draws a picture of someone, or paints a picture of someone, or twizzles a twizzle-snoot of someone… they are basically making a picture of themselves.
So, this Paffooney that I paffooned of a purple mouse in a Don Martin-esque style, is supposed to be Mickey the cartoonist. And Mickey is supposedly, basically me.
And here I am as Muck Man, the superhero. It is me because the super power he has is his horrible, non-adorable, and unrelenting stench. The horrible smell of him renders villains and bad people unconscious or worse… sometimes straight to the hearse. And using his olfactory assaults on evil as a way to make something terrible into something with a -someness of awe, makes him indubitably, indelibly basically me.
And here is a picture of a boy who might’ve been my son if only I had been given enough good sense to fall in love with that first blond young lady who first had thoughts about making babies with me. I didn’t. I’m stupid. And now she has only girls. That makes it a picture too of basically me.
And this little not-me was me all along, and as the boy who sees colors, it’s really not wrong. Synesthetic they call it in a name that’s not long, but is resoundingly deep like the words of a song.
And you might argue this one and say that it’s true… “This one is too pretty to be a picture of you.” But you would be wrong on this basis, you see…
The monster inside me is basically me
And here I am all magic and purple, and I just blew the rhyme again, so this isn’t another danged verse. I drew this picture of Milt Morgan from an old school picture of me.
I often say the character in the stories is based on the Other Mike, the other boy I grew up with who was named Mike in my little home town.
But he thought like me, he acted a lot like me. He even looked like me, at least a little bit. So, if I am portraying him, I am depicting basically me.
And this is the naked me, as a nudist back in childhood in Rowan, Iowa, which I never was… not like this… but still am. Because I am a writer. And writers always write about their naked selves, showing the whole world what saner and more prudish people keep secret. If they were truly smart and wanted to keep their secrets to themselves, artists would never draw or paint or write about or twizzle about themselves. In fact, they would make no art at all.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, Paffooney
Art to Help Me Be Happy
Some of the drawings and paintings I do, I do because they make me happy. I know it’s more noble if I do it to make you, the viewer, happy. But part of making art is that you are making it for your own needs. Art is therapy. Often, art is love. This picture of Shannon (not her real name) makes me happy. She was a student I loved, (only in the legal, Platonic sense.)
This one makes me happy. I drew it on a day I needed to laugh. And I laugh a little even now when I look at it.
This one is also a smirkable smirk-maker.
I drew this on a day when I was lonely.
This one tickles me on many levels.
These Telleron, temporary Martians helped me start my publishing career with the publication of Catch a Falling Star.
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And pretty girls can make me happy too.
Especially naked ones.
And I mean drawing them, not what was in your evil mind.
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, drawing, humor, Paffooney
Art Unseen in a While
WordPress has put in a new feature for finding old photos from Posts Past.
This allows me to pull from past years much more easily than the scroll-down feature I have been using. Thus, art from 2017.
This has been a look back at pictures posted in 2017, starting in December, and going back in time to January. There is at least one picture from every month.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, old art, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 
Living in the World I Once Drew
It is normal for the world we live in to inspire us to draw pictures of it. But architects do the opposite. They imagine a world we could live in, and then build it.
Sometimes, like in the picture above, I draw real people in imaginary places. Other times I draw imaginary people and put them in real places.
Sometimes I put imaginary people in imaginary places. (I photo-shopped this planet myself.)
In fiction, I am re-casting my real past as something fictional, so the places I draw with words in descriptions need to be as real as my amber-colored memory can manage.
When I use photos, though, I have to deal with the fact that over time, places change. The church does not look exactly like it did in the 1980s when this drawing is set.
Drawing things I once saw, and by “drawing” I mean “making pictures,” is how I recreate myself to give my own life meaning.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, collage, commentary, humor, illustrations, imagination, Paffooney, photo paffoonies
Tagged as Saturday Art Day