Happy Halloween

 

This is the very first graphic I ever made in Adobe Illustrator, about 5 years ago.  I wasn't very skilled at it then but somehow I made it work.

I have surmised that Charles Shultz made it as a satire of the new and dubious Christian religions on the scene today.  While all the other Peanuts characters were out trick or treating, Linus invented a new holiday, i.e., "The Great Pumpkin," who would rise out of the pumpkin patch on Halloween to bring presents to all the boys and girls.  Linus would wait all night in the pumpkin patch, but the Great Pumpkin ever showed up.

What a crazy concept.  There was never any such doctrine, but Linus continued to believe in it even though It never panned out.  Shultz never indicated any crazy religion that he might be satirizing, but the religion that seems most appropriate as an analogy is that of the Mormons.  Their beliefs are bizarre. ahistorical and to me, not Christian at all.   Their founder, Joseph Smith, was the real Linus Van Pelt.

RELIGION: Ticket to Heaven or Hell on Earth?

 I am not now a member of any religion.  I was raised as a Christian protestant, studied the Bible, went to church.  But something about it always bothered me.  It seemed too simple and too unfair.  The Bible said Christ stated "no one comes to the Father except by me."  No Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or other faiths.  That seemed unfair, as some of these faiths were thousands of years old.

To be a Christian you believed that Jesus was the Son of God, or even God himself in the flesh, and you would go to Heaven when you died, after the Judgement Day.  If you did not believe in Jesus you would go to Hell and suffer incredible agony forever, no redemption possible, no do-overs.  Secretly, without telling my parents, I rejected both the concepts of Hell and the exclusivity of salvation though Jesus Christ.  I believed in God, but not the angry God of the Bible.  After a few years I stopped attending church.

To me. dogmatic religion felt like putting your brain in a small confined cage.  Every spiritual or philosophical question had to be interpreted through the lens of religious doctrine.  An example is the Near Death Experience, where various experiencers were dressed down by their clergy or priest, who asserted that such experiences are delusions created by demons.  A total cop-out, in my opinion.

Today I tend to believe in an afterlife as indicated by many thousands of Near Death Experiences.  I also tend to believe in reincarnation.  I say "tend to" because I prefer to leave my mind open for new facts that may come about.  I reserve the right to change my mind and not be too dogmatic in my beliefs.  

Falling Leaves of October

There Is No God Named Allah

 

Fall Scene with Peanuts Characters

 FALL SCENE

Autumn Leaves Graphic

 I am experimenting on making graphics of Fall.  I started with these Maple leaves.  

Turning Point USA logo: How to Make It in Adobe Illustrator

 

I was intrigued by the logo of Turning Point USA and struggled with Adobe Illustrator to make a copy.  I tried making rectangles and lines and warping them with the warp tool, but nothing seemed to work. Then it dawned on me, the curved rectangles were derived from a circle.  I drew an ellipse, colored it red, then used the shape builder tool to cut the ellipse in half, delete one of the halves and hollow out the center of the remaining half, creating an arch.  (I hollowed out the center by making a copy of the half ellipse, coloring the copy black and resizing it to fit inside the first half ellipse. Then I used the shape builder tool to delete the black filler, which also deletes the area just beneath it, leaving an arch.)

Next, I again used the shape builder tool to cut the arch in half, and colored the bottom half black.  Final steps:  put a white line through the red arch, using the curve pen tool, and placing a red triangle on the end to create an arrow.  Finally, I put 4 white stars on the bottom arch, and grouped the various components into a single whole.

For the lettering I used the Times New Roman font, same as used on the original logo.  Here is the original logo as found on the web.

THE GRIM REAPER OF ISLAM (Graphic)

 

A Skull

I needed a skull for one of my projects so I drew one myself, using others online as models.  Here it is.

Note:  I generally make my graphics with a transparent background, so they can be easily superimposed on existing backgrounds. See my post of September 19 below to see what I mean.

Feel free to use the image if you like.

Lucy Makes the Scene: A New Edit of a Palestine propaganda Piece

My latest salvo in the Snoopy Wars on X.  I edited the Palestine propaganda cartoon by replacing the Palestine flag with the Israeli flag, adding Lucy Van Pelt to the picture and some dialogue.  Trash can was added also.

The X poster's version of Charlie Brown is awful.  She made him smaller than Snoopy, his dog.