King Charles the Brown Contemplates Life harks back to our old project of Snoopunzel, an adaptation of the fairy tale using embellished tracings from some old coloring books. The AI had a hard time getting a hold of By the Way, a picture inspired by a passage in Little, Big. So I include two of the four tries that I did before I gave up..

This is My Life Now

And I've got tons of drawings to go through still. As I examine each page I am reminded (in at least a vague way) of what I was going for and why I drew each each bit, whether I was doodling or had an inspiration in mind. For instance, Coelacanth and The Shining Path were both inspired by Shriekback songs. The Secret Door was an early portal fantasy of mine, about a boy finding a way into a magical land; I wrote of poem about it that never came to a satisfactory conclusion and which must be around here somewhere. Mr. Oakshot looks somewhat like me (an unplanned artifact of the program); also maybe like Thornbriar's more successful brother. Another bear, but not Bear. A design for a falcon-headed god and a winged lion and an urban monster arising from the sewer. But who is that dark and sinister figure coming down the stairs? Old visions breathed into new life.

Blastseses from the Pasteses

I have new interest in life. I've been making these enhancement out of image scans I made long ago. I have come pretty close to using up those images. Now I am engaged in opening up dusty old folders that have been shuffled around for at least ten years but seldom examined, taking pictures of those drawings, and making new enhancements. It's fascinating ... for me.

I include several of the original drawings so you can see what the AI program has to work with, and what it does. He Waits is supposed to be a cutaway look at a tunnel that leads into a buried chamber; I don't know if that exactly came through. The Porch was a sketch of a set design for a folksy play I was working on: the mischievous kids of a family work on fostering a romance between the cook and the gardener (hired help) who have been feuding before. Dock is from one of my my few 'realistic' efforts.

Not Without a Certain Charm

Though many of these are from what I would call second or even third rank of drawings in my files, they all clean up into rather nice if undramatic pics. And they include some of my oldest. Dwarflord is from what I call the Old Mill Notebook; Colortree is definitely middle school era; and Oldcastle is a sketch from art that I produced in Miss Strey's Art Class, a work that until now I had deemed unrecoverable (I'd tucked it away and forgot it even existed). Colortree and Oldcastle are from an experiment I did with my camera phone: snapping the picture and sending it to myself via e-mail. I had been running out of scanned material to work with; this method opens a new wide world to my efforts. The Cunning One has three arms; put I'll let that stand for now; I find it a rather pleasing effect.

My Multidimensional Versions Through the Ages