Pouring My Art Out

Some of the finished artwork from my new children’s book…

Posted on September 2, 2015 by pouringmyartout

Just thought I would share a few of the pictures with you that I have been working on.

Sort of give you an idea what the finished book will look like.

Of course, there will be funny words on all these pages…

And an amusing story to follow along with…

And lots of things for kids to think about and talk to their parents about…

And there will be a nice… I hesitate to use the word ‘moral’… but maybe ‘life lesson’ might not be far from the truth… at the end.

The thing is… and this is a ‘thing’ that I have thought a lot about in my life, being all art-side-of-the-brain and all… is that artists, any kind of artist; writers, musicians, whatever, might not have a responsibility to include positive messages in their art, but they have an opportunity to do so. If you can get people interested in your art, and then slip in some positive messages, or even some things that might make people think about life, you have done something important. You have reached people who wouldn’t have heard your message if you had just tried to talk to them about it. Maybe that is why comic books have reached such a level of popularity. Mixed in with all the violence and super powers are timeless messages about the fight between good and evil, and picking a side in that fight, and using your powers for a positive purpose.

Since I started writing songs and playing the guitar and singing, I have put messages in my music… (you can hear a few of them if you click the button in my top bar called something clever like; ‘My original song videos’)… My action/humor science fiction series of novels, while exciting and funny and obviously poking fun at all the things humans take too seriously, is full of positive messages. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but even in this blog, between being silly and facetious, I slip an actual message in now and then.

If you think about it, all the best art you ever were aware of did the same thing. I don’t mean that every song or book ever written had subliminal meaning, but there were lessons you could take away from them, and things you wanted to ponder in them. The Beatles were particularly good at this. ‘I want to hold you hand’ might be just a simple song about love, or it might not. ‘Give peace a chance’ is pretty blatant. ‘All you need is love’ might be an oversimplification. But all their words are lodged in all of our self-consciousnesses, … (why is that not a word, spell-checker???)… and the words meant things to all of us on a deeper level than just the words themselves should have meant.

Posted in fiction, My art, thinking about stuff | Tagged art, arts, books, children's book, comics, drawing, humor, music, painting, social-media, writing | 16 Comments

A children’s book is born… (or); A look inside the mind at the creative process of an artist and writer… who also happens to have crack squirrels living in his cranium…

Posted on September 1, 2015 by pouringmyartout

Well, there it all is, the original, amusing little comic strip that I drew when I was a teenager so many years ago… with all its ‘making fun of creation myth’ overtones… along with one of the watercolors… ( the flower picture up above)…that I keep at my mom’s house in the Bay Area for when I just feel like playing with watercolor paints. I am going to scan the flower picture and use it as one of the backgrounds. I will just use Photoshop to stick one of the pictures of Gadzooks, my little wizard, right inside it.

The mission: Turn this not-too-kid-friendly story into a cute book for little kids.

So I broke out the pencils and brushes and watercolors. Oh look, there is the map I did for that other novel I have started writing, the one about the princesses who lead a revolt against an evil king.

I started off with a few sketches.

Obviously, besides having to eliminate the ‘teasing people who take religion too seriously’ thing, I have to change the whole end of the story.

And that meant adding a new character… a cute little girl wizard.

There is nothing more satisfying than watching a simple pencil drawing come alive with color.

You can almost feel characters come alive. And the best thing about the way I do the children’s books is that I don’t have to worry about smudges or bleeding colors, because I clean it all up in Photoshop later!

It is really sort of magical.

The colors you choose can change the whole feeling of the scene.

And then, of course, you have to set them out in the sun to dry before you can move on to the next color.

A good watercolor scene is all about the background color washes.

Layer adds upon layer, each adding depth.

Don’t be afraid to go crazy with the colors… as long as you don’t destroy the paper by getting it too wet too often.

From blank piece of paper to an adorable little moment where a friendship is born.

Add a few shadows, and you get even more depth.

But it is when I do the inking, making things pop even more, that the magic feels the most real.

Posted in cartoons, fiction, My art, Stories of my life | Tagged art, arts, books, childrens books, current-events, humor, painting, social-media, watercolors, writing | 16 Comments

Uh… just read the cute little story… complete with pictures… that I drew… back when I was about 17-years-old… and I will try to explain what I am doing with it at the end…

Posted on August 31, 2015 by pouringmyartout

——————————-

Okay, where should I start? As I mentioned, this is something I did way back in the day. Obviously it is nothing more or less than a creation myth story that pokes fun a religion in a gentle way. Using the name ‘Gad’… one short letter of ‘god’, was intentional. I am not apologizing for the intent of the original story.

The original was laid out on 5 big pieces of paper. I scanned them and then sort of cleaned them up a little, and retyped the text, in order to post this story a long time ago. Evidently I was always a bad speller, because I noticed some obvious mistakes.

This was never meant to be a finished piece. You can still see the old, dirty paper around most of the images. I just cleaned them up enough to give you the idea of the story.

But Gadzookes, the adorable little wizard, is the perfect character for a children’s book… and that is what I am working on now. I removed all the religious overtones and gave him back his original, full name. I did some new watercolors to change the ending. But I am reusing all the pictures of Gadzookes that I did all those years ago.

My main goal is twofold; to have a second children’s book so that I can start sending letters to children’s book agents and publishers… on top of the sci-fi ones…. and also I am going to try to format this all by myself and send it to my self-publishing company.

If I can learn how to publish books on my own, I can stop relying on my older daughter to do it for me. (She isn’t sure I am smart enough to do this, just so you know, and neither am I)… HA!

Stay tuned later… or tomorrow… for some photos of the new artwork for the ending that I painted at my mom’s house. I might also post some of the cleaned-up, more-or-less finished pictures of my little wizard to get some feedback

See ya later.

Posted in cartoons, fiction, My art, Stories of my life | Tagged art, books, childrens books, comics, creation myth, current-events, humor, painting, religion, wizards | 16 Comments

…wait… now the stats page is back to the way it was…

Posted on August 31, 2015 by pouringmyartout

… why are you always messing with my head, WordPress?

Posted in Everything Else | 6 Comments

Great… WordPress changed the stats page… again…

Posted on August 31, 2015 by pouringmyartout

yay

Posted in stuff about blogging | Tagged bloggers, blogging, blogs, changes, current-events, humor, social-media, wordpress | 20 Comments

I think we should make ties out of beef jerky…

Posted on August 30, 2015 by pouringmyartout

Then, if you get hungry during a meeting…

Posted in thinking about stuff | Tagged beef jerky, current-events, fashion, food, humor, ideas, inventions | 13 Comments

Well, I don’t want to start posting about my newest art project yet, because weekends are always slow on WordPress, so here are some random pictures of me petting some horses…

Posted on August 30, 2015 by pouringmyartout

Posted in dogs and other animals, Pictures of me | Tagged animals, horses, humor, photography | 8 Comments

Drunk dialing the dog…

Posted on August 29, 2015 by pouringmyartout

Last night, my wife and I went out for Mexican food. I had a couple margaritas. On the way home, with her driving, I just happened to glance at the screen of her in-dash monitor that was displaying a split-screen of the map on the right, and the Bluetooth auto phone number list on the left. The first number on the phone list was ‘Home’.

And then it hit me. Sitting at home, hopefully not getting into any trouble, were our dog, Shiloh, and my wife’s aunt and uncle’s dog, Riley, patiently waiting for us to come back.

And it struck me that it would be pretty funny to call the house phone and use the answering machine to leave them a message… which they would be able to hear live as it recorded.

I mean, think of how you could mess with your dog.

“Come!”

“Who want’s peanut butter?”

“Sit!”

“Let’s go for a walk, who want’s to go for a walk?”

“Good dog! Let’s get you a treat.”

That would be worth getting one of those security video cameras installed just to see what the dogs would be doing…

I didn’t really end up doing it. It would be mean. But it is still kind of a funny idea.

Posted in dogs and other animals, thinking about stuff | Tagged animals, dogs, drinking, humor, joke, pets | 28 Comments

Pouring my art out… getting back to the basics… and a chance for you to name my new robot buddy…

Posted on August 28, 2015 by pouringmyartout

I have been posting pictures of my travels so much lately that this blog has turned into something other than what it used to be. But now I am all caught up… and it is going to get weird and artsy and poury all up in here.

My daughter and my wife flew home early and I had three extra days at my mom’s house in the Bay Area. The crack squirrels were going nuts! You might remember that I did a post about all the stuff I was doing.

I read through the first copy of my new book… book 3 of the Otherwhere Chronicles. (The first two books of this hilarious and action-packed series are available on my book page, which you can get to by clicking on the pictures of the books over there in my sidebar… just sayin’)… I just this morning emailed the few small changes that need to be made to my older daughter, Jessica, who is my tech expert on formatting the books for publishing. Then that book is going to be available too.

I also am working on another children’s book, but I will get to that later.

But here is a new twist… I am writing a novel… aimed at teenage girls. Hey, don’t try to make this weird. Jessica is always challenging me to try writing new kinds of stuff. She encouraged me to write the murder mystery set in World War Two London that is being edited as we speak by my head blog minion, Mr. Trent Lewin. (Hi Trent, get back to work, or no minion chow for you!)… and as Jessica points out, I raised two awesome daughters as a house daddy… before it was even cool to be one… and most of my best friends have always been female. So I am digging deep into the female side… the better side… of my artistic soul.

Here’s the thing… and this is just one of those things I like to do to challenge myself… but, unlike my sci-fi books, which I force myself to write without any pre-planning at all… (I just let me get myself into tricky situations and then try to figure out how to get out of them)… I am planning this one out in advance. I mean really planning.

Here is a glimpse into the creative process for this new novel, which I hope will break the barriers that Disney has set up around the whole ‘Princess’ genre…

Oh yeah… storyboards, character sheets with descriptions and motivations and details, notes, sketches and maps of who is going where and why and what they did and what they are going to do… all laid out on my mom’s piano. I even, since I had the watercolor paints out to do some more artwork for my next children’s book, did a hand drawn and painted map of the fictitious world the story takes place in.

This novel is going to take the princesses back from Disney. This ain’t a book aimed at 7-year-olds. This is Disney princesses meets the Hunger Games… only without kids fighting to the death as entertainment. I am talking kick-ass teen princesses who become pirates in order to rebel against the evil empire taking over their world.

One last bit of art to pour out, and it isn’t mine. Remember all those hand-made robots that Jessica made for Willie’s third birthday party? Here is the one I adopted.

I love that little guy. And I am giving you all a chance to come up with a name for him.

Posted in My art, Stories of my life | Tagged art, arts, books, fiction, humor, robots, writing | 18 Comments

sunsets and crack squirrels…

Posted on August 27, 2015 by pouringmyartout

When I was at my mom’s house in the Bay Area, I went down to that place by the bay where people walk their dogs… because I was missing my dog.

I didn’t, for a change, get any good pictures of the dog friends I made that day…

But I did take this series of pictures of the sun playing hide-and-seek behind the low clouds… or high fog… whichever…

Photos never really capture nature adequately, do they?

I also took some sunset photos from my mom’s deck… stupid power lines…

Well, I zoomed in on that one and cropped it, so that is a little better.

But then you miss so much of the sky. I do like the way the sun is lighting the edge of the clouds… or fog…

And I spotted one of my squirrels, the crack squirrels that live inside my head…

He decided to go AWOL for a while and steal some of the cat’s food.

I also, as usual, saw deer, raccoons and turkeys, but I didn’t really get any good pictures for a change. Anyway, I am trying to do these posts quickly, because we are about to get all weird and artsy up in this thing!