State Champs

Plastic hat, slightly crunched, featuring Arcanum High School colors, orange and black, and the year the basketball team went on to win the state championship. Saving this for Chris as he went to the game in Columbus with his grandpa Custer.

Thanksgiving

Audrey, Patty, Abe, Melinda, Noah, Melissa took picture at Thanksgiving a couple of years ago.

Wash Drawing

I guess this is one of the more difficult things to do—make a wash drawing using India ink and water and a small red sable brush. At the time I was making drawings for magazines and most were just black ink on white paper drawings because those are called, "Line Drawings" and a figure created with those tools (red sable brush, water, India ink, white paper) is the same as black and white printed text when it comes to making printing plates. The artwork above is the same as a photograph because it has lots of different shades of black—it is called a "halftone" like a photo. This was done back in the early 1970s when I did a lot of artwork for western magazines.

Raccoons

My favorite raccoon. She showed up one day and looked in the window and I snapped this photo of her.

She lived under my shop and had four baby raccoons there and raised them up until she weaned them and then she sent them up and over our board fence for the last time.

She was a wonderful wild animal and I often think of her and her babies.

The four of them are shown in this photo. The mother was on the ground behind them and was coaxing them to go on over.

It was a whole new world for the baby raccoons and they were not so eager to leave the only home they had known.

Gusty

The first time I saw this picture, somewhere, I copied and saved it. It reminds me of that photo of Marilyn Monroe's dress flying up when she walked across a grate in a sidewalk. I do think that a photographer should be looking for the unusual around him and hold off on just snapping the shutter at any and everything they come across. Try to capture the moment and don't create to photograph.

Mrs. Starr, my English teacher, listened to me reading a story that I wrote for class. She critiqued my story while I stood in front of my Sophomore English class, embarrassed and red-faced; I was our class president and was elected by popular student vote and I had used the word, "raised" instead of, "reared." My country-school education (we had to start there and go through the 8th Grade before we were promoted on to high school) had never prepared me for words like this. I would always say, "She raised me" and at that time didn't know words like "reared."

Birdhouses

I used to go to the local Aullwood Store and buy a ready-to-assemble birdhouse. I went to a local sawmill and asked them to plane down a cedar board to 1/2 inch thick and I used that wood to cut the different parts of a birdhouse from. These are some examples of old ones that I painted and hung on the old board fence as a colorful winter treat.

Coopers Hawk

It was a foggy morning. You could see the birds at the bird feeder and the hawks were watching them too. This immature Coopers Hawk flew to the board fence and perched there and stretched his wings and tail feathers out in an effort to dry them so his flying would not be so labored as it was with wet, fog-soaked, feathers.