Hello again. Here is my last (I think) post in response to the Rorschach Test prompt from the Kick-About challenge hosted by Phil Gomm. This is my fully analogue response.

This inkblot looks EXACTLY like a lugubrious Long-nosed WhaleFish swimming across the surface of a lake carrying a weird, slightly menacing figure with a smaller figure on its lap.

It looks like that to you too, right?

So I tackled this one with Polychromos pencils and Posca pens. I really wanted it to be travelling left to right (English language picture book illustration is now in my bones), but when I was most of the way through, it looked better up the other way, mainly because of the colour in the water reflection.

I’ve refrained from ‘cleaning up’ the image in PhotoShop in order to remain true to its hand-made inkblottiness. All I did was dot a bit of white Posca pen to some of the more intrusively messy marks. So here it is.

Dogfish with Piebald Child riding a Long-nosed WhaleFish who is Really a Prince Under an Enchantment. If you want to rescue the prince, you’ll probably have to climb a mountain, wearing slippers made of prickly pears, and retrieve a plum from a magic tree that only fruits once every 50 years. Then come back and feed it to the fish… or something. I wish you luck. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be a nice prince when he is human again, so you’d better be on your toes, if you haven’t lost them to frostbite.

Below I’ve flipped the image so that you can compare it with the original ink blot.