
I am giving better hints now.






This one was commissioned by the same friend who wanted the bear with attitude from the last post. Required: Some tikis in a jungle, and some blue flowers. Green and blue, to match the colors in some room or other. The tikis are, for the most part, sketches of the tikis scattered throughout my backyard, carved by me, yours truly.
I should say, for the record, that when I say “Commissioned”, I mean, they came up with ideas, and I was just thrilled that someone wanted to hang my stuff in their house. I basically did it for free. Okay, fine, I made them promise to listen to a few episodes of my podcast. It was blackmail. Plain and simple. I have no shame.

This was commissioned by a friend, who wanted a Grateful Dead bear with attitude… and some very specific accoutrements.

Then I took another photo of the same picture in different lighting. For whatever reason. And here is what it looked like in an early stage of the process. For those of you interested in such details.

Why are you purposefully trying to dumb the next generation down? They are your own children. All the focus seems to be on sending them to a church where they are told what to think, and not to ask questions. Schools should only teach hand-picked facts that don’t make them feel bad. Critical thinking and asking questions are how we advance as a species.
If you want dumb kids, don’t expect America to do it for you. Homeschool your kids. Then you can teach them to not think about anything at all. Perfect little robots with no internal AI. What could go wrong? And go ahead and teach them your own idea of whatever your religion is. Teach them that hatred and bigotry and racism and misogyny and random acts of cruelty are the messages that your god requires you to obey in order not to burn forever in hellfire.
But just so you know, this whole new way of raising kids is a SCIENCE experiment, and you don’t believe in science… probably because your own parents weren’t big on this whole ‘learning how to think’ thing.

The cover of my new, full cover for my combined novel series… The broom, briefcase and admiral’s hat are all relevant to the story.

The paintings are my originals, that have been hanging in my garage for decades. I just added the text, and the objects on the front cover. Wait. I did take some spaceships I painted and one that my son-in-law Jason rendered, and Photoshopped them onto my painting to make the sky more crowded.

So I guess that is only mostly an old, original painting.

But that one is all… young me.

This is just the first copy, to check for errors. This one is all my design, and cover art and the included illustrations inside the book.

I used my own paintings as the front and back cover images.

It is also heavy… and thick… like me. 574 pages of funny, exciting space adventure. Great characters. Multiple dimensions. Oh, my!

I think I may have borrowed the basic idea for this from a Grateful Dead site, but the craziness is all mine. I love the little dancing bears!

I will share a few photos of the painting process, just for fun.

And a few early stages of this painting too.

This is just for you who are interested in painting.

Also, it proves that I painted the dang things.