It’s a funny thing. When this book is finished, there will be tiny little fragments of it, like this one, only about 3 cm long, that I will really like. I think this is my favourite part of the book so far.
It has fat scribble and thin scribble, dancing together. They cross over each other in opposite directions.
I love scribble. And layering. And paint splatters. I wish all of the book were as loose as this. But it’s not.
Onward.
Now I know how Dr Frankenstein felt… It’s all good fun until you create a monster.
This is surely the Weirdest Blob Ever.
Firstly, I don’t know what this blob is made of… While the kids were doing their homework (boo!) and I was cooking dinner (actually it was cooking itself) I found a piece of paper in the kids’ art and craft drawer with this mysterious stain on it. It had no odour, nor any bloody fingerprints, so I assumed it was safe to use without notifying the police.
The first thing I saw in it (although I was looking at it rotated 90 degrees anticlockwise) was the shoulder, face and tiny wings of a beast. He had strong haunches and was clearly crouching on top of something (invisible) and looking down.
I drew him in. But what was the fragmented blob beneath him? He was not crouching on it. It might be something fighting him for the whatever-it-was in between them. Then I saw the woman’s face with the veil over her head. The woman was confronting the beast. So I drew her in. I decided she was some kind of Earth Mother figure and they were fighting for control over the Earth. So I drew the Earth in… and some decidedly weird explosions….
By this time the dinner was no longer cooking itself and needed some help, and the kids were asking questions and giggling and pushing each other at the homework bench. (That’s my lame excuse for the state of the Earth Mother’s hands… or claws.)
So I beat them all soundly and sent them to bed.
No, I mean I fed them, played Trivial Pursuit with them and sent them to the shower. (I lost at Trivial Pursuit of course.)
‘Now I’ll fix this weird blob with a bit of discreet colour’, thought I. ‘The colour will work its magic…’
I have no scan of the first coloured phase. Sorry ’bout that. But you’ll have to take my word for it that the colour made the blob look even weirder. Especially since the space fight was going on (at that stage) in a completely white environment.
I’m not sure why they are fighting as the Creature looks quite amiable and isn’t even raising a paw against the Earth Mother. Maybe He is trying to protect the earth and She is the one who wants to destroy it with storms, hurricanes, asteroids and plague. I would ask them if I could, but they wouldn’t hear me.
Then I added watercolour to create dark space around them but it wasn’t dark enough and the contrast became so low that the effect was one of a brownish blob surrounded by a larger greyish blob. I added some Prismacolour black pencil as a quick experiment in increasing the contrast. It succeeded to a small degree. Too small a degree.
I scanned the whole blobby mess.
In an act of insanity (given the amount of work I have to do right now!) I added a further layer of tone (purple) in PhotoShop which more or less addressed the contrast problem, and added some stars and magic sparkles. (How low can you get?)
Finally, as if to confirm that I have lost my grasp with reality, I wrote this post about the history and evolution of a nondescript and very weird blob.
However, now that it has been so thoroughly described, it can no longer be deemed nondescript… at least in the 17th Century sense of that word which is to say ‘not previously described or identified scientifically’.
I feel there are still some holes in the scientific nature of this blob though, so perhaps a thesis?
or
or
This evening was the Drama Class night, when I take my two plus one more to a drama lesson at a big leisure centre. We always enjoy the evening despite the slightly rushy nature of eating early straight after school and then getting to the class on time, when nobody can find their shoes, or their book for the car or remember to go to the toilet until we are about to drive away… the usual stuff. They are a happy bunch of three and I enjoy their nutty company. I also enjoy the slightly-less-than-one-hour of free time at the centre when I can draw just for fun.
This week’s 52 Week Illustration Challenge theme is ‘feast’. It’s not a theme that lends itself to time poor folk because it conjures up mental images of banqueting tables, rife with imaginative and mouth watering detail. Forget that.
Having grabbed the nearest half-stocked ‘art backpack’ as I went out the door with the mad ones, I found that I had limited supplies with me. (You were wondering what that subtitle The Fast was all about, weren’t you?) I had a vintage book to draw in and a box with pencils, fine point felt tips losing their inkiness, a brush tip black pen (also fading), one deep terracotta red crayon and a small paintbrush but no water receptacle.
Thinking I’d hopefully find a pithy quote to illustrate in the vintage book – something that brimmed with feastiness, or failing that, feistiness – I found it was all about a family during the Gold Rush and that Hugo had used the first half to practice scribbling with thick black texta.
Not to be deterred, I found a page with a description of an extravagant breakfast. I set to work illustrating it using a pencil and the first subject that came to mind: a chicken serving breakfast. Unfortunately the chicken was so long and elegant of neck that she obscured the text she was illustrating, so I swiftly moved on.
I found the page above and quickly drew Mrs Pym in her kitchen with the fading brush tip. She’s okay. But remembering that the brush tip is water soluble I found I hankered to deepen the tone with a bit of water. No water. Aha! Yes! You guessed it. The Curse of the Black Tongue!
I confess I glanced around me to see that nobody was deeply offended, as I proceeded to use the nearest clear liquid to hand… or mouth.
I had half a drama class still to use… what could I find? After a few minutes of fruitless searching, I gave up on wasting time looking for food references in the vintage book. I thought I’d draw a pelican with a border of fish leaping around him on the page. And so I did. But the fine point markers kept running out on me as I drew, so I kept changing, keeping to a .5 or below.
Although a real pelican would be more likely to feature blue legs I think, the red crayon came in handy here. And once complete, I was just left thinking how much I’d like one more colour to highlight the fish with. If only!
Oh happy pelican! As I resorted to the Black Tongue again in a not-very-hopeful kind of way, thinking that this time, the ink was waterproof, I found to my delight that all but the bird’s body and one wing were drawn in fine point markers that were water soluble and which when wet became green!
I am quite pleased with my pelican page. But I can still taste that ink on my tongue.
Lunch break bird blobs.
Felt tip, watercolour pecking and white acrylic flecking.
I could’t help noticing that these blobs painted late last night when feeling tired and a little low, all have one thing in common.
Despite the fact that they all were generated from random colour blobs, they all look downward to the bottom right of the page.
contemplative cassowary
Scott pointed out that this fellow looks Muppetish. A compliment :-)
pondering purple person
preoccupied parrot
Ptentative Pterododal
No wonder this Ptreposterous Pterododal is Ptentative… His wings are ridiculously inadequate for his size. I’d stay on the ground, if I were he.
Here are some of the coloured blobs from a week ago.
An assortment of mutts, birds and abominations.
Sickeningly Girly Mutt
Disappointed Mutt
Cheery Puppy Mutt
Gloomy Mutt
Sniffy Mutt
Wiry Mutt
Cheery Bird
Moulting Bolting Bird
Silly Bird (Hugo’s favourite)
Opera Owl
Salvador Snail
Political Pig
Bunny in a Box
Our old boy, who sleeps with his tongue hanging out now. (But not with his eyes open…)
Pencil sketch with digital wash.
Time for a 2 minute Big Blob. Not on watercolour paper, and hence no fuzzy edges.
Well here they are! Some mixed results. 
I will include a few close-ups of the more interesting ones. 
People blobs! Can you believe it? 
Assorted terrestrial and aquatic monster blobs. 
A sad rabbit blob 
And a range of birds in varying degrees of preposterousness. Including the rare elephant bird. Are you sick of blobs yet? I don’t think I am quite. Here is a sheet of blobs done during the kids’ drama class on Wednesday evening. A ran out to the car with a page of still wet blobs to play with when we got there. It is quite a stimulating way of spending a few minutes, and more fun than sudoku for me :-) 
The dogs were the things that worked best here I think. I extrapolated a lot more than I have previously too. Because some of the blobs suggested just part of a face.
Here are the ‘second pass’ blob creatures. There are also a couple that didn’t make the grade with the first pass and are now so much improved that they are going up after the second pass.
This dino is as corny as ever :-)
Little Elephant is messier but richer for his second layer of colour, I think.
I like Little Bird much better for his red head and little tail feathers.
Stork looks much better now to me. He’s having a ball at the beach.
Thoughtful bunny was not a success to my mind. The patches were a mistake, but you never know until to try.
I like this guy now he has some autumn leaves bothering him. Lots of movement now. I could have painted his coat actually…
This funny little beckoning dog didn’t go up first time. He’s better with a bit of shadow. (Do you recognise the cloud over Stork and the autumn leaf here? They are all close neighbours on the same page)
Finally, a parrot who didn’t make the first cut. I like his feathering now that he has a bit more colour. Ticking in feathers or fur really does something for me. I love it.
And here, to finish up, a whole page of weird new blobs. We shall see what happens when I add a touch of colour to some of them. It’s a different effect of course, over grey; the colours are subtler, less pure. But this is what I did with the bookmarks originally.
And now it’s back to my Thunder work for the day.
Judy Watson 