Tag Archives: Saturday Art Day
Double and Triple Portraits
Sometimes a single face is not enough to convey the person you want to portray.
Why This Picture?
This is a character from the novel The Boy… Forever. Icarus Jones is based on a kid I mentored back in the 1980’s. His real name was Jose. He was incredibly curious and good at skateboarding. He went to college at Notre Dame.
This picture was inspired by a piece of pottery I saw in 1994 in New Mexico on my way back to Texas after visiting my sister in California. The background is an imitation of the glaze on the pot. The Native American Boy is drawn from a model in a Sears catalog, one that was wearing a polyester t-shirt and narrow jeans.
These are all students I taught my very first year as a teacher. Teresa would even get a teaching degree and come back to teach in the same school district as me, though in the elementary school, not the middle school where I taught.
This is a picture inspired by a dream of being alone on a tropical island with a native island girl. Fifteen years after drawing this picture, I married a girl from the Philippines.
Dilsey Murphy is a character based about 85% on the older of my two sisters. The 81 is the number of Minnesota Vikings defensive end Carl Eller. My sister and my father were rooting for the Vikings as I rooted for the Kansas City Chiefs in Superbowl IV after the 1969 NFL season. I am still not allowed to gloat over who won.
This is a portrait of the main villain in the Disney version of Treasure Island. That book is the one that really hooked me on reading novels in the winter of 1966. I read Grandma Aldrich’s copy of the book illustrated by N.C. Wyeth that February while I was sick with the flu.
The background of this picture is my last actual classroom at Naaman Forest High School in Garland, Texas. I used it for this illustration of Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates in my novel Magical Miss Morgan.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, nostalgia, Paffooney
What Makes a Child Beautiful?
Loving others makes you beautiful.
Filed under artwork, Celebration, humor, illustrations, kids, Paffooney
Sicky Saturday Art Day
I am not posting anything sick. I AM SICK. So, expect random pictures from my gallery file.
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
Catch a Falling Star 