I am not posting anything sick. I AM SICK. So, expect random pictures from my gallery file.
Tag Archives: Saturday Art Day
Sicky Saturday Art Day
Saturday Memories and Long-Past Longings
This oil painting is Highway 3 in North Central Iowa. The little town of Rowan is dead ahead on the South side of the road. The year is probably about 1984.
Brent Clarke is a fictional character in several of my novels. He is pictured here with the actual water tower of Rowan, used to portray the fictional water tower of Norwall, Iowa from my novels. In 1984 Brent would have been about 22 or 23 years old. The people the character is based on would have been 28 or 30 in 1984 depending on which one you think he is more like. I will not, of course, tell you who… because you could argue there is no one answer to that question. He is arguably me at some point in every story he is in.
Valerie Clarke is as close as I can come to declaring I have a main fictional character in my novels. She was 11 in 1984, the year that the book Snow Babies is set. The real girls she is based on would have been 28 in 1984 (my former classmate) and 3 years old (my former student.)
Milt Morgan is a fictional me-character, although I can argue he is almost equally based on the “Other Mike” that I grew up with. He was a year older than me and one grade ahead of me in school. In 1984 the character would have been 23. I was 28 and the Other Mike was 29. This portrait was made from a school picture of me. But somehow it also looks a lot like the Other Mike.
This is Anneliese Stein. She is a fictional character based on stories I was told. She was thirteen years old in 1945 when she died at Auschwitz. Her mother brought her back to life as a gingerbread girl in 1975 using fairy magic. Well, possibly through the magic of her mother, Gretel Stein, as a storyteller. And, according to the story that was told, she became a Storybook Fairy when her mother died and became a fairy too.
This is Bobby Niland, a fictional character from several of my novels. He is based entirely on a student from one of my classes in the 90s. The fictional Bobby was only six in 1984. The real Bobby probably seven in 1984. In the story Horatio T. Dogg, Bobby was fourteen and a half.
You can easily see that, because of living a long life with an extra-vivid imagination, not all of my real memories are of real things. There is more to it than meets the eye. This is an imaginary portrait of Valerie again, this time at the age of seventeen. It is one more imaginary thing hopelessly intertwined with all the real things I remember.
Picture Palooza
This Saturday Art Day is about whatever danged pictures I whimsically decide to show you. I am not proud of them all. I am too focused on being a better artist. But today you take what you can get.
Art Day Look-Back at 2015
This is artwork from this blog in 2015, a year after I retired from teaching.
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, oil painting, Paffooney, pen and ink
Happy Whatever You Celebrate!
Now Entering Gingerbread Village
Rodeo Jose
Valerie at the Farm
Story Illustrations on Art Day
One of the things I am increasingly doing is illustrating my novels and essays in the pages of books published on Amazon.
More from the work-in-progress, The Necromancer‘s Apprentice;
What follows are published illustrations;
Recipes for Gingerbread Children
One of the glorious things about ebooks is the fact that they allow colored illustrations which will print as black and white in the paperback version.
These, of course, are only a small sampling of the many illustrations in my books, especially the more recent books.
Filed under artwork, humor, illustrations, Paffooney
An Idiot’s Guide to Art Day
No, I am not calling you an idiot, dear reader. I am the one providing the guidance material.
So, if I were to try to explain art day in an Idiot’s Guide aimed at explaining the essence of it to Doofy Fuddbugg, one idiot trying to educate another, I would explain that I am lazy on Saturdays. All I want to do is post pictures and not have to write a lot of heavily-thought-out words and ideas in the usual droning idiot’s essay of 500 words or more. So, I go through my WordPress picture file and find interesting pictures to post without having to draw or paint anything new.
I confess that I do not merely select pictures at random. I try to get pictures I haven’t used in a good while. This double portrait of Gretel Graymalkin, and what she looks like naked in the moonlight, hasn’t been used in a post since last year. And there is a bit of rhyme and reason to it too. Gretel is an idiot.
And this is a picture that any idiot can tell is a real picture of fairies in the park discussing the building of a new fairy circle after it finally started raining heavily again in Texas after almost a decade of drought. Of course, it has to be an idiot to tell that. Most people would recognize this as a pen-and-colored-pencil drawing photo-shopped over a photograph. Even the mushrooms are not real. I have it on good authority from fairy-kind that they are actually pixies in disguise.
And then there is this rare bird I drew a couple of years back. He is a surrealistic peacock who thought of auditioning for NBC before he learned they don’t still do those “Now in Living Color…” ads anymore. He’s surrealistic in that he could not possibly be real, unless he were really just a bowling pin and lady’s fan put together by a deranged painter with a mental disorder that makes him do decoratively dippy drawings on things you really shouldn’t be drawing upon in the middle of a bowling tournament.
And who can forget this idiot, an avatar of me as a purple Mickey in the style of the late great Don Martin of Mad Magazine fame? He’s the whole reason you get foolish lazy-Saturday posts like this at all, There has got to be a cure for that somewhere in the multiverse.
Filed under artwork, cartoony Paffooney, humor, imagination, Paffooney
The Reds and the Blues
Lord, grant me peace
In times of great violence
Grant me wisdom
As everything around me burns in ignorance
Let the cold blues
Be tempered with warm reds
Let me juggle life’s fortunes and misfortunes alike
Red balls over blue balls
Yellow, purple, and green
Over and under
The spiraling path
I’ll keep written records
In journals with pictures
And share my discoveries
With any who’ll listen
And I’ll always keep close in my heart
The people and places and memories
That mattered and shattered
The whole color wheel
Because Shakespeare once showed us the whole color wheel
Is necessary for magic to form on the page
And though yellow is also a primary too
It’s the reds that warm life as the color of blood
And the blues let us chill as the deeper color of ice
But let there no period be
To stop the color progression
Of this warm/cold blank verse
Nor rhythm or rhyme sully
The Reds and the Blues
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.
The Adventure that is Art Day
If I look for the essential action shots in my art to find pictures that illustrate “Adventure” I am frustrated to find that I am much more a maker of static portraits than comic book action scenes.
Catch a Falling Star 