More Memories

More old stuff. This will be going on for quite some time.

These are a few of the RC airplanes I had when I first started out. I had trouble flying them, crashed one beyond repair, and gave up. About six years ago, with the advent of 2.4 gigahertz radio systems and electric flight I gave it a try again and finally learned how to fly RC. Best of all, I did not have to drive miles and miles to find a flying field. I had a nice area right at the end of our block.

This is an MRC Cessna Cardinal. If I could find another one of these today, it would be a perfect vehicle for an electric flight system.

Model ships! I quit model sailing ships after building these-- too tedious!

Everything in this collection of x-planes is 1/48th and all are assembled from cast resin kits except the X-3. Eventually I threw these away. Can't believe I did that.

This was my room at home, many years ago. I was a model builder from an early age. Note the X-2. I carved that out of hardwood. I had nothing but a few pics in Air Force Association magazines to go by. I didn't get the wing sweep angle right but otherwise it is pretty good, I think.


When I got to Texas Tech on a National Merit Scholarship, I lived in a number of dismal apartments in North Overton. As you can see below...

...they really were very dismal. This was not the worst of them.


More memories next time.

From the Archives

Let's start dragging out the old, dusty, cardboard boxes and see what we can find. Dead mice?

 The car above was photographed at an automotive swap meet and posterized with photoshop. I really like messing with digital effects and I started doing that as soon as such software became available.

This car was hotrod material. It could also make a great jalopy racer. These photos are many years old and were digitized long after the fact.

Another one! From the same swap meet.

The photo above was taken in Palo Duro Canyon with a 110 camera. Remember those? They were crap, but popular. I found one with a telephoto lens at a garage sale and used it a lot in the mid-eighties. What did I know?

Here's a chunk of amethyst after a lot of digital massaging. The amethyst is several million years old but the photo is more recent.

That's me with a big chevy van in Palo Duro Canyon. That van had a Firebird 400 4v V8 mated to a 350 transmission and hauled ass at 10 mpg. Gas was cheaper in those days. It had a 33 gal. gas tank. Most of the back of that van was empty except for a long bench seat that opened up to reveal storage compartments and an ice chest. I had that van several years and enjoyed it a lot. 

I'm three years old in these photos. My father was a car nut (and also a bit of a gun nut) and he built the little race car, with my mom's help, using model airplane construction methods: bulkheads and stringers, covered with canvas. He built model planes, too. I remember it under construction on the porch of the house we lived in at that time. At first it had wheels and I would ride it down a steep hill at the side of the house. No brakes. You stopped by crashing into a barrier before it went off into railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill. The crash at the end was the best part of the ride.

I built model airplanes, too. This is a Guillow's Stuka. Barely visible in the background is a '64 Fender Jaguar in sunburst. I played that guitar through an Ampeg Reverb-O-Jet with a Proco Rat and an envelope follower for special effects. I wish I still had that guitar!!

This was my first model ship. Here it is under construction. I built Scientific's "Sovereign of the Seas". It turned out OK.

My dad also liked gardening. He turned the backyard into a jungle. 

This was my first close-up of Tech Terrace Park. Tree bark. Details count.

Before the North Overton neighborhood was demolished I took photos of places where I had lived when I was a student at Texas Tech. This was one of those places. Lots of memories here. 

I looked like this in the late eighties or early nineties-- can't remember exactly when these were taken. I really liked that t-shirt. But even then nobody knew what the heck DOS stood for. I'd begun the weight training I still do today. I can't lift as much as I used to, unfortunately. Getting old is not easy. 

Finishing The Graphic Material

Since this stuff is GRAPHIC, maybe I should provide a warning? Not. Not that kind of graphic.

So I did more extensive Photoshop manipulations...

 The one above has a Peter Max psychedelic quality to it, and I rather like it.

I felt that I was getting interesting results.

And they printed well in large formats.

I did a lot more of these things before I lost interest. I put some on the walls and I realized that they were rather disturbing and distracting. The psychedelic era had passed. What you want on your wall is like visual elevator music. Even a Cezanne is visual elevator music, although of a high grade. The things I was making were  more like visual assaults. I shifted my interests to more conventional photography.

Next time, I will continue to rummage around in my archives.

Going Off The Wall

I have to admit that I have always found representational art boring, except when the things represented are aircraft, or automobiles. Back in 1972 I got in the habit of sketching, doing imaginative renderings in pen and ink and charcoal. I did get books on figure drawing and art anatomy and practiced representational drawing as a kind of discipline, but the objective was more control, so I could break rules with an objective. And then after doing this for a time and building a portfolio I let it all go dormant because I didn't have the time or inclination anymore and the stuff I did deteriorated so badly it had to be thrown away.
Digital photography and programs like Photoshop gave me a thought: why not try working in traditional media and use that as a starting point for digital manipulation? One thing I wanted to do, is transform small, rapid, sketches into big renderings.  When I retired, I thought I'd give this a try.

Here's a sample of some of the little sketches, done rapidly and then magnified. I've had to reduce file sizes on all of this stuff in order to post it here. 

I tried adding some color.

Back in 1972 I really liked surrealists and expressionists.  Max Ernst blew me away.

Some more sketches using surrealist methods:

Surrealists used techniques that generated a lot of accidental picture elements, and Photoshop did the same. I saw nothing wrong with that.

I was handicapped by the primitive digital cameras of that time. I had to use software to enlarge files so they could print at poster sizes but a lot of sharpness got lost.

I don't have the original mixed media forms of any of this. After I photographed things I tossed them. I've been kind of thinking about trying this again, since the cameras are much better and I don't have to drive anywhere. I can work on this in the garage. Problem is, I don't feel very creative anymore. I can't reach into my psyche and find stuff the way I used to, and I don't know how I could get that back. I think I've been living a very conventional life for too long. I don't "see" things the way I used to.

I'll continue with this old stuff next time.

Let's Finish Wilson!

I can't really see myself going back there. 

Historical stuff here!

I think the old Mercantile Building is the best thing in Wilson-- the ONLY thing worth seeing there. My wife and I were very lucky to have gotten a tour the first time we visited Wilson together. I've got that documented in this blog, elsewhere. You'll have to hunt for it. If you do, you will find many interesting things.

So! Next time I will show some things I did when I was experimenting with graphic art. I've got some of that in a very old blog entry but I think I will put up more examples and describe what I was doing. After that, it is going to be a lot of rambling around in memory lane!