July 19, 2015

“My Hoovercraft is Full of Eels” -- visual ramblings



Digital sketch done in the manner of Exquisite Corpses, the surreal method of adding words to each other without thinking; if you say one word I add the first another without any prefrontal cortex censorship. (As sentences form around a festive table in the middle of the night, round and round from mouth to mouth -- do try! -- they tend to get more and more, hum, Freudian...)

This was drawn in the solo manner of this game, start with a line, add something else, see what it wants to become even if abhors you. (Something more or less like the Paranoiac-critical method, q.v.) A line and half an eyebrow wanted to be fish, inkdrops hint old school telephones and their shadows are sailing away, perhaps to find a Hungarian phrasebook.

Normally (warning, Photoshop geekery ahead) I have one layer for the outlines and one for colours behind and below a backdrop in progress, quite a stage. Here I had a background and a layer of pure improvisation. (Doing this in oil, adding and subtracting all the time, would be quite sticky, and you'd end up no less colourful than the painting.) It would be interesting to know if the background colour subconsciously affects the foreground (as we're taking this dream machine out for an airing with no leash or even dog goodies to bribe it with) -- we know that different wallpapers do. I once had to sleep in a room with stark red ones. The company wasn't very good either, but that's not the point, and the only thing that helped was a change of walls and roof and, sadly, company; merely tapestry didn't help a bit. And now I am babbling, for free drawing liberates the mind.

As for the title of the post, it is perfect. It has nothing to do with the subject; at least not consciously...