Illustrations for Peter the Pirate

I recently ran across some old illustrations I did for my Peter the Pirate stories.  I drew them quite a while before I went off to the UAE. and they've been stored in a manilla envelope for nearly 5 years.  I took them and scanned them and then using those scans, I put backgound color to them on the powerpoint program so then had some color and mood to them. 

 

This is is from one of the Christmas stories called "Chirstmas Island" 
I never finished the illustration and I haven't put the story on the blog just yet

 

This is Peter talking to his dead mother in the underworld called "Dreamland"
Peter was taken from her when he was a boy by the British Navey.  Up until that time
she had been an American loyalist, but this practice of essentially kidnapping
young men to serve on the King's ship under inhuman conditions is one of many points
of contention that led to the eventual revolution.



This is the Botanist.  He was  naturalist and empiricist. 
He is another shade that Peter meets in the underworld.  The Botanist
lives on an Island of his own creation, but refuses to believe he is
dead, choosing to still live according to the rules of his empiricist
belief.  Peter has tremendous love and respect for him all the same.



The Little Wooden Fool
Was a peace offering from the man who ruined Peter's life.  He was a cruel, petty
Captain uner whom Peter Served.  His cruel ways led to a mutany.  His life was spared and
the mutany was bloodless due to Peter's intervention, but mutany is mutany, and there
was no other option, even for honerable men, than to take up the life of piracy.



Careem, a Maldive prince who became Peter's closest friend and spiritual twin.



Most of these illustrations are from the--well--epic adventure called, "the Commodore's Journey"  If you can imagine a ballad going on for about a hundred pages and is still unfinished that's how long it is.   As for the look of the illustrations, I was hoping that they would have a sort of woodcut look to them--at least that was what I was going for.  The idea being that this story takes place sometime between 1750 to about the time of the American Revolution so a woodcut seemed appropriate.  If I could make them look more like scrimshaw, I would--that would be far more appropriate.





The Tower Black
This is deep down in the caves below the iceshelves of the antarctic.  It is the setting
for the climax of the Commodore's Journey







Sammy Kirkendol, a ghost, and former member of Peter's crew.  In this picture he is doing his best to help
Peter in his promise to find a certain spirit in Cold Black Bay in the antarctic.  Sammy warns him
of Edmund Black and his many traps.



The Ghost in the Cloud Chapter 22 & 23

I didn't post during the month of June.  I try to get a least a couple of posts in every month, but I've been distracted by a number of personal issues. I actually recorded these two chapters quite a while back and never got around to putting it all together. 

The Ghost in the Cloud series is, as I've said before, a kind of graphic novel/comic book only without the pictures. Chapter 22 focuses on Angelina's Mother, who has thus far remained a background person.  Chapter 23 picks up with Angelina's deal with Baba Yaga.  She has agreed to give Baba Yaga ten minutes of her time and is about to find out just what that means.

Sketches



This was done by a pencil
with a peace sign on it!

 



 I have a number of ideas for my blog, but they are all taking more time to get together than I seem to have at this point in my life.  So, in this blog, I thought I’d try to get away from music, videos , poetry, educational reflections and writing and do some old fashioned art work.  I’m not nearly the artist my daughter is or that my friend Melanie is, for that matter, but I thought I’d get back into my art work for a while. 

I’m working a bit more with shading and highlights.  I think, soon, I want to work more on eyes.   A good eye is hard to get and to line two of them up in correct proportions and have both eyes fixed on a specific point is tough for me.  Then I also need to get the highlights right on the glossy surface, and then there are those little shadows made by the lids that have to be done right for the sake of dimension and/or depth.

It reads:
"the pencil is mightier than the sword."

I like fingers—though I still have far to go to get them right.  I like them because they are crooked.  I like the look of the hands of really old people.  Their hands have stories to them through years of things those hands have done

I’m in a draw phase. I don’t know why I go in cycles like this.  Sometimes I will spend my time reading, which I like to do, but then I get away from reading and write.  Then I can’t write so I make music, and then I can’t do music so I draw and so forth.  I end up being a jack of all creative trades but master of none. 



A lot of things I create I end up posting on this blog.  I do so because I am human, and it is in our human nature to share what we do.  Even though I post my stuff here, I know that not too many people see it—perhaps only about fifty or so people, even though  I average between two to three hundred “views” a month, but really, I suspect that actual views are mostly from friends and relatives.  Sometimes there are more views, sometimes less.  I know this from the stats page and from hits on my YouTube videos which are embedded here.



It's a really cool pencil.



  It doesn’t matter to me that not too many people see what I make--I left the fantasy of achieving money and fame from creative endeavors long ago. It is some other motivation that keeps me going—a kind of a compulsion—I have to be creative.  Creativity is one of the few things that help me to stay sane.  So I keep this blog as my scrapbook.  I measure my growth, here; and sometimes even my lack of growth.  Nothing I do is quite perfect, my flaws are obvious.  One of the worst drawings I’ve ever posted here is of Molly Malone.  One of my best is of the Hood Hood, I think, from the illustrations I did for the story of “Solomon and the Hood Hood.”  I like the illustrations I did of the Arabs for Mimi’s “Hassan” concept for our ESL work out at the base.  Someone has been making use of them, and that posting, I suspect, is being used by someone to learn about the parts of clothing that the Arabs wear, and that thought makes me happy.

A Student in the Shadows

There, right between noun-verb agreement, prepositions and interjections and other grammar elements lies a little essay, a reflective essay, that would have been seen by no one had I not insisted that I check all the essays in e2020 before students can continue taking topic tests and moving on to new content.  

She, the one who writes it, is thin—too thin; and she is quiet—too quiet.  Her dark hair hangs over her unadorned face and she has a kind invisibility to her that I have known and seen before.  It is a kind of screaming invisibility.  She is shrouded in black mist and shadow somehow.  Her brother is in the adjacent room.  He too, is quiet and has the same invisibility and black mist around him. She mentions him early on in the essay, but here is the part that is haunting me:

He was a 51-year-old man living in his parent's basement with his sister and her two kids. Which was already pretty crowded and just plain wrong. But somehow, my mom thought it would be a good idea. Just a few days after living with him, we saw his true side. A drunk jerk that no one wants to be around, not even his own family. Every night he'd have at least a bottle of vodka mixed with OJ. He was not a happy drunk either. When he'd drink he'd get pissed off about everything! And no one would ever say or do anything about it so he was use to pushing everyone around. Which made our relationship all the worst. I could not take someone yelling at me calling me a "Bit**" for no apparent reason…

I have seen essays about worse situations that this, but today, I cannot help but stop and reflect on this one.  I sense it only scratches the surface of the pain.  I have the impression that her childhood has been a hell that is hard to imagine.  I look around the lab and see all the students silently working away and wonder how many of them live in similar desperation and pain.  A school like this one, I think, must be a relief to them.  They plug their headphones in to the computer, face the screen and work away.  No teacher stands yapping at them all day long, no parents to shout abusive things at them.  If they need help they sign-up for a teacher and one of us comes around.  They can see as much or as little of us as they like or need.  It is peaceful for them, really.  Sitting, tuning out the world like that is a kind of luxurious isolation—and being isolated like that  in a computer lab, safe at school, is better than being in an over-crowed home with an abusive drunk demeaning you all the time.

She was gone today.  I was just randomly checking to see who needed to take topic tests when I ran across the essay.  The auto-grading scan gave it a “0” without explanation.  The essay needs proof reading and it is written in one long stream of consciousness paragraph; but it was very articulate about the depth of her feeling—something a computer can’t begin to see or understand.  I very much need to talk to her about it.  I need to get a better sense of her need or if there is more that verbal abuse.  I need to see and talk to the school social worker who is not here this after noon—just so she knows and is aware of the needs of this student.

Early Tulips

Everyone I know is a bit freaked out by the weather we've been having. First it was a really mild Winter, and now it is followed by an extremely warm Spring (I capitalize the seasons). In fact, last week it was a lot like Summer. We're all using words we've been hearing forever to describe it, like "climate change" and "global warming" and wondering if we humans have really messed it all up. A lot of my conservative friends are in denial about global warming. They think it's all a liberal conspiracy or something. I’m not sure what liberals are supposed to gain by looking at the evidence and becoming concerned about it. I suspect that industry and the large energy corporations that stand to lose big profits if they have to endure the regulations to restrict the greenhouse gasses they pump into the air has something to do with it. So anyone who believes that there is global warming must be branded a liberal and is probably going to hell.

Hell, I think, must look something like the tar sands development of Alberta. National Geographic referred to this part of Alberta as “the Dark Satanic Mills” A lot of people don’t realize it is a reference to William Blake. I think it was in the poem called “the Chimney Sweep” and was his attempt at describing the polluted skies of England during the Industrial Revolution

But I’m a long way from tulips. Well, global warming or not, I am witnessing yet another fantastic Spring that is nearly a month early. I was very lucky to be off on a sunny Sunday morning. So I took Sammy (my dog, as you may well know if you follow my blog) and we went downtown and took a few pictures of the tulips. In about a month tens of thousands of tourists will descend on Holland, Michigan for Tulip Time and I doubt they will get to see a single tulip! Hey, but I do! I live here! And I get to see them without fighting the crowds!

The Ghost in the Cloud Chapter 21: Ifrits

I had a great deal of fun with this chapter of Ghost in the Cloud. Angelina’s sojourn is an adventure through myth, folk tales, fairy tales, legends, and religious beliefs. My advice to anyone who listens is to believe nothing you hear, and yet believe everything. Fairy tales are real, as far as I’m concerned. They are lies too. I am not even trying to be accurate about the stories—when I retell them I change them, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. What I’m really trying to do is work something out. The whole thing is a search, an exercise in finding patterns in all the myths and stories—an idea that all these things—all these stories, beliefs, and myths stem from “collective dreaming.” I get the idea—kind of, sort of—from Karl Jung. Dreams flow from our subconscious. Myths, folk tales, fairy tales are like dreams that flow from our collective subconscious (Freud and Jung may have actually said “collective unconscious” but I prefer saying “collective subconscious” “sub” implying things just under the surface of consciousness—things that hide from our conscious state, but a with little teasing, and training we can tap into insightful things about ourselves by bobbing down and pulling things up and out of that subconscious)

The trick to enlightenment is to understand that reality is in the human mind. Sure we have science. We have empiricism. We have these relatively novel ideas that the universe is composed of concrete laws and forces that form reality. We have people who believe there is an objective reality out there. But the truth is that this reality—the physical part of reality I mean— is registered by the senses, but interpreted in faulty human brains. We place a lot of faith in our perception through the senses. But perceptions can be tricked. No two people perceive things exactly the same. The horrible and wonderful thing about is that we need each other to find the elusive Truth.

The problem of Truth is that it doesn’t sit in a temple waiting for Indiana Jones to come and find it. Truth is on the move. It doesn’t stay put. Truth is a magical white stag. It appears then vanishes and we have to track it. It seems to be leading us to something—perhaps to Avalon, perhaps to Shangri-La, perhaps to heaven or Eden, perhaps to Nirvana. Christians say that Truth is a person. “I am the Truth”. But somehow it never registers with very many of them that that means that truth is not a fundamental principal. They keep going back to the patristic writers, the bible, the law, the canon, back to rules and writings as if truth was a quantifiable hammer to bang over the heads of other people asking them to conform to a right way to live. I see no truth in these acts of brutality to people. It is social control, not truth, because if Truth is a person, it is mysterious—knowable but unknowable. It is a relationship. Persons are not static. Persons grow, change, and surprise us.

But I am rambling. The Baba Yaga stories are a lot of fun. In some stories, she is more of a wild woman, but in most stories she has a taste for children—eating them that is, so as a witch she is sociopathic and not a nice. A witch in many Native American cultures is a person who has lost their center and their imbalances tend to create imbalances in others—they end up living lives that go all wrong and dark. They become crazy and sociopathic. In Islam, a witch is also sociopathic. A witch is someone who makes deals with dark jinn and, in time, they are corrupted by the jinn. They may become possessed by the jinn. The Baba Yaga stories are told and loved all over Europe, mostly Eastern Europe and Slavonic countries. I ran across a really good blog on Baba Yaga if you would like to read further: ttp://babayagawassilissa.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.htmlhttp://babayagawassilissa.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

Elizabeth's Fish Boxes

This week I want to show you something my daughter, Elizabeth, came up with for Valentine’s Day. I think these are amazing, but then, I’m her papa. You’ll have to judge for yourselves. Just as there is a family resemblance, it would seem there might also be artistic resemblances in families. She admits to being inspired by the St. Nicholas Boxes that I made while she was growing up.

She has gone into much more detail and has made use of some pretty fancy computer programs to refine her work. She designed them, did the art work, experimented a bit and then had the materials printed up. She says the boxes take about 15 minutes to assemble and then fill with her treats. These boxes she then gave away to her friends and is saving the ones she made for our family when we next see her.

You can see that she used the fish theme and the Valentine’s Day charm and wit she has printed on the boxes reflect the aspects of a Valentine’s Day card. I really like what she did with the fish on the lid. She had them printed on plastic and had to cut each one of them out and glue them down.

Anyway, I am enchanted by her ability, very proud of her creativity, and I thought I’d share these with you.

Okey Takes a Bride

Happy Valentine's Day!