Miscellaneous doodles (now with Tasteful Dwarven Erotica)

Sialia said:

I do have more, but I'm holding them hostage.

Will trade new pics for comments on posted ones.

Critique & suggestions are fine. We start with the premise that these were rejects.

Click to expand...

To quote a very good friend:

"Oh! Lord, I hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it!
It never does the things I want
it just does what I tell it!"

I just spent an hour writing comments on your pictures, and as I was proofreading it the browser crashed. I'll try recreating it, but with a totally different mood comments will not be the same, and this time I will not proofread anything

I am not a very experienced art critic. In fact I haven't tried my hand at this since we had two mandatory assignments in high school (which was back in the eighties...). Neither am I an artist, and normally my taste is strongly placed in art that "looks natural", but I do enjoy the occational "strange" picture. What I will try to do here is communicate how I feel when I look at (some of) the pictures, and what I see. Since formulating feelings is more that hard in my native Norwegian, I will not put any effort into being polite when trying in English. What I write is what I feel, but I don't try to be mean. After all remember that I like the pictures you make enough to write the comments to get more of them.

So starting again from the top...

The blood-llamas is a nice enough picture, bit nothing special (except the method, which I find highly amusing). The blooded snowfalkes under the blood-stained moon, on the other hand, I find chilling. It gives me a feeling of a murder mystery in a cold (maybe Norwegian) wilderness in winter where only the moon is a witness and the falling snow covers all tracks. Or maybe it is three of the new monster Blood-demon? Two of them beating up the third, just because they can? In a frosen layer of the Abyss with the bleeding moon being the only (and constant) source of light?

The candle is scary. It is like one of the trick-pictures with two different interpretations. Either it is a lizzard or salamander trapped in the light, crawling towards the flame. Or it is the shadow of a (young?) asian girl/woman looking to the left kneeling with a bright pin holding her hair back. It suggests a story if trapping souls and draining them for power (or heat of light) and it gives me a sad feeling of lonelyness. Somhow the burning of the candle is all the light there is for someone, and it is needed to keep the dark away, but at the same time it destroys something beautiful.

I'm no big fan of collages, but I like the scaly girl in number two. Maybe she could get her own picture somehow exploring her curiosity?

The first watercolour used to be my favorite until i examined all the pictures again and again to write the comments. Now I feel her right arm is a bit strange, but mostly I feel the picture doesn't really decide what it is. It tries to be both sad/blue and gay/fairy and a bit regal and mysterious. Sometimes that works very well, but this time I get a feeling of being undecided instead of the much better feeling of seeing more than one thing.

The second watercolour captures the "seeing many things" much better. I change my mind almost every time I look at it. Is it reflections in a broken mirror? Is it the partially clouded sky? Is it a dream of the moon? But I guess the image from an hour ago still is my favourite: I feel I am inside a very old church or temple built all in marble. Even the windows are very thin marble (like an opaque glass, with patterns in them). It is sunken into the ground and worn and tired. I look out through one of the highest windows, still barely over the ground and I can see the moon, and the shadows of history dancing. The strong warrior, fallen for his cause at last, his dark love lamenting him, and the eternal moon watching in silence.

The third watercolour matched my before-crash mood perfectly, but doesn't math so well now. I'll try to remember... It is a perfect picture for the end of a really sad love story. She has lost her love. He is gone and she has finaly found the solitude to let the sorrow in. She is oblivious to the beauty of the sun's beams shinging on and around her. Only her loss and broken heart are real to her. And as her tears fall into the silent water they don't make rings, they make broken hearts. Sad, and very very beautiful (I have stolen a copy fo my harddisk )

The three last watercolours don't come up to the first three for me, and the mammoths are just nice. Except the first one, but I have seen that one before? It is a lovely picture of trust, and maybe Faith (in the religious meaning). The fragile girl going without fear to the enormous, strange creature with a gift, and the love of the strong for the weak.

The flying car was used in the final of CDM this time, I think, and got much better treatment there than I can give it here. So that leaves us with the disturbing lines. I might agree with the judges, but to me the two charts/lines floating into wach other and seemingly destroying (at least seriously disturbing) each other is creepy. Even if I avoid the symbolism of having dark/brown flowing into and disrupting the orderly white (it feels too political, and I know too little of US politics and culture to go there). It just gives me the creeps to see this. It might be PirateCat's story of superheroes more or less flowing around, but I like it, and think there is a disturbing horror story behind there somewhere.

And then the Dwarven Erotica. I think the propotions of the dwarf are a bit off and he has far to little "fur", but seriously, we all know that is what dwarves do. They are no better than dragons, and if I remember my Nieblungenlied and Voluspå correctly there even is precedence for them becomming dragons because they lie on their gold

I hope that is enough comments to get a few more pictures? Pretty please?

Håkon
sending without proofreading in fear of another browsercrash

This is marvellous, and I thank you for perservering and being willing to write it a second time.

The main thing I want to know is which pictures seem like ones that would make good Ceramic stories--the ones that intrigue, suggest a story. I'm often deliberaretely ambiguous when I work for Ceramic, because I'm trying not to overtell the story--if I give too much away, it's harder for the contestants to find thier own voices. But it shouldn't be so ambiguous that it doesn't suggest anything at all.

So your comments are perfect--just the sort of impressions I like to get.

I'm particularly intrgued by your coments on the "And so we meet again" lines. Every time I've looked at this one, I've found interesting story ideas in it, but I didn't know if anyone else would. The political angle would be something new to me, and I'd like to hear about it--it's not unreasonable to see it there, even if I didn't mean it. There's a tension between the forces interacting that suggests various kinds of opposition to me--if the writer finds the tension, there's a lot of freedom to interpret the forces at work.

I'm not on my own machine at the moment and so don't have access to more pictures this morning, but when I am back at my own desktop, I'll surely post more soon.

Thanks so much.

I think the "many induce grandma-incompatible stories" may have been a result of my being present. I seem to push the grandma scale even when presented with pictures of happy bunnies playing in a field of wheat

No comment on photoshopping pictures of your own blood....

Glad to hear your voice Mythago. Wishing you a speedy recovery.

(Also wanting to hear all the gory details at some point, when you feel up to it.)

Somewhere around here I have some that I actually drew with you in mind as a competitor. I'll have to dig around and see if I can remember which ones they were.

Quick disclaimer here: sometimes I do draw pictures with particular contestants in mind (as in, "gee, I wonder what Mythago would do with a picture like this") but I think this is still fair because I'm not doing the picture selection, and I never tell the judges which pictures were drawn for which competitors.

To my knowledge, no judge has ever paired up one of these kinds of pictures with the contestant it was intended for. Proof of this is that despite the incredible number of woolly mammoth pictures I've done, Piratecat has never gotten stuck writing me a woolly mammoth story.

Sigh.

They didn't stick him with my nice portrait of Tycho Brahe either. (Can't find a finished version of it at the moment. I'll have to keep looking.)


Anyway, I can't remember whether this one got used or not, but I remember wanting to see what Mythago would have done with it.

This one I drew specially for Yangnome, even though he was a judge and not a contestant this time around. I figured the competitors would need to be darn careful writing about underwater stuff for a judge who dives off the Monterey coast.

Because, yes, I really am that evil.

He was kind and didn't give it to them.

I wanted to draw something with some action in it--something really exciting, and not sentimental.

Had trouble getting the angle of the mast just right though--still looks odd to me. I excuse this because obviously, by now it's no longer at its original angle.

I'd boast that this duck was sketched "from life" at the pond behind my office while I was on break one day, except it was pretty clear that this duck was a loooooong way "from life."

But gosh darn it, all the live ducks kept moving around too much.

Apparently none of the judges were interested in reading stories about ducks floating belly up.

Can't recall if any of these got used.

a series of tone drawings