Tag Archives: Saturday Art Day
Female Figures on Art Day
Filed under artwork
New Photos of Old Art
I spent some time this last week taking photos of artwork. You see, I bought a new phone a year ago, and the camera installed in it was of much better quality than I had before, even in my digital camera which I mysteriously lost more than a year ago. But, though I played with it a lot in the last year, I only started using it to photograph artwork recently. It makes better digital images of my art than I had before.
The new camera can capture the subtleties of a pure pencil drawing better than any camera I have ever used.
I love this picture… even if Disney sues me over it.
I love this one too. Remember it from yesterday? This is the same digital image made on Wednesday.
Here’s a nude faun to celebrate getting kicked off Pinterest a second time (though this time there was no actual nudity in the picture I got kicked off for… and it was not even my own picture.) (Is there something wrong with cartoon furries?)
Valerie Clarke and her Daddy Kyle.
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, drawing, oil painting, Paffooney
The World Does Not See Me
The world does not see me. I am invisible. I could invade your planet and the world would never know it… or care.
I have told my stories, sung my songs, and raised my family in the shadows while the world was unaware.
I’ve shaped lives from other cultures, and made myself a home in the quiet places there.
My imagination has been soaring, and I create things in mid-air.
And I’ve not forgotten heartland dreams, and the good lands all so fair.
And the world just does not see me, though my eyes, they are upon it as it’s around me everywhere.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, Paffooney, poem
Children of the Land
Children are a resource that we, as a people, cannot live on without.
If we stop having children, nurturing children, raising children, providing children discipline and education, entertaining children, guiding children, and, most of all, loving children, in eighty or so years, human beings will be extinct in this universe.
How many universes are there with humanity being extinct in them? It is impossible to answer. But if there is more than one universe, there is more than one.
When I was a child myself, family farms were still the rule in Iowa. Couples would try for lots of kids to help with the farm work. Chores! I fed animals. I went with my grandfather to the feed store, the hardware store, and the hatchery. I drove a tractor. I walked bean fields and pulled weeds. I mucked out a hog house once (and believe me, once is enough for a lifetime.) I have slopped hogs. I shingled a house and a garage. I painted the family house (in town, not Grandpa’s farmhouse.) As a child, I helped my uncles who were farmers, and worked for other farmers in the area. I was just as important as fertilizer to the maintenance of the world I lived in. (I did not say I was important to USE AS fertilizer. They would’ve had to kill me to use me that way. But my work was a part of what made the land yield plenty.)
I was left, as a child, with the distinct impression that we were meant to live in the land as a part of the land. Nature was our friend. We didn’t cut down all the trees and pave over everything like the city folks did. The kid who never went skinny dipping was rare indeed.
There once were people who knew they lived with the land, and they were good stewards of the land. They knew if the land was not living well and healthy, then neither would they live well and healthy.
But I am not arguing that we should go back to the world of the 1960s. The work I did in the land back then is now mostly mechanized and done by machines, computers, automation, and factorization. But we can teach our precious children the values of old to use in new ways. If we don’t, well… I hope the AI Terminator Robots of the future will have a happy life without us.
Filed under artwork, farm boy, farming, humor, kids, Liberal ideas, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom
Art Because I’m a Nudist
Yes, be warned, these are all drawings of nude people. But not porn. Innocent, nature-loving nudes. So, if that offends you, look no further.
The real question with a drawing like this is, “How well can you draw it, Mickey?”
It is also important to realize if you are drawing from a real-life model, especially an under-aged model, you don’t want to make it so well that the model can be identified and stalked in the real world. Though I am not a good enough portrait artist to really worry about that.
Making-‘Em-Look-Funny Art Day
MAGA Man
The cartoon portrait exaggerates and calls attention to things that are not ordinarily something to be proud of. MAGA Man’s defiance, Doofy Fuddbugg’s toothless grin, or Dorothy’s threatening presence can all make us laugh and enjoy the funny thing that no one else can give us.
Crazy Catnip is here to put an end to this.
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
Drawings Made from Real-Life Models
Filed under art editing, artwork, colored pencil, Paffooney, self portrait, studio
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?
Drawings that use Metaphors
Ah, Reluctant Rabbit using the big pencil in the front of the classroom. What could that be a metaphor for? How about teaching kids by showing them how? You teach writing by writing in front of the class, talking out loud about your process, editing yourself, and polishing your writing in front of those who need to learn those skills.
Is an avatar not a metaphor for me?
Catch a Falling Star 