Being a city kid, I don’t have much of a feel for farms, so I did a search on aerial photos of farms and faked up the phony-baloney farm above. Sorry to report that my enthusiasm for Inktober has waned and I’m glad that this one gets it over with for now.
1) Guy walking with armload of books, papers, packages says “Heavy!” 2) A paper slips out and drifts to ground. Guy: “Whoops” 3) Guy reaches down with one hand for the paper. As he says “Nngh” with exertion, the unstable stack starts to topple. 4) Guy topples too and says “Ah Jeez” 5) Guy starts to pick himself up and turns and sees a large vehicle barreling toward him. Uh-Oh!!!
This is the soul of slapstick: a chain of ever-worsening events leading to exciting disaster. My drawing style, barely coherent, is slapstickily chaotic as well. So this text serves as libretto (Italian. Literally “little book” but “cheat sheet” is a more apt translation) to the scribbly operetta above.
In the mid-1980s I went camping three times in Havasupai, the west end of the Grand Canyon, with family and friends. This drawing looks nothing like Havasupai but I threw the helicopter in because if you took that 10-mile trek to the Havasupai campsite, by mule or on foot, and then found yourself unable or unwilling to go out the way you came in, there was a helicopter ferry service. Cost per person, in 1985 US Dollars: $500.
To each their own.
Egomaniac
Mumbled, exploded, with will to absorB
All that young stuff that’d come to his dooR
Restless a c q u i s i t i v e n e s s his agorA
Loved making cuckolds of husbands of womeN
Overindulgence and theft unmisgiveneD
Ne’er-do-well gaming the scene like NintendO
Egomaniac
Mumbled, exploded, with will to absorB
All that young stuff that’d come to his dooR
Restless a c q u i s i t i v e n e s s his agorA
Loved making cuckolds of husbands of womeN
Overindulgence and theft unmisgiveneD
Ne’er-do-well gaming the scene like NintendO
Today’s prompt is “Tempting.” Tempting to me implies that the activity of allure is something we are supposed to avoid. So I loaded an index card with artifacts of gambling, alcoholism, satisfaction of raw lust, hard drug addiction, and violence. It was only after I’d finished the image that it occurred to me that the word Tempting is of eight letters that divide in have to a nifty shorthand DEFINITION of Temptation: Temp (temporary) Ting (tingle). The acrostic poem follows, as minimalist as I could make it and still qualify as a poem. (Note: the four words Testament, Ennui, Meditation, and Playacting would comprise a more minimalist solution, but the mental gymnastics involved in justifying their relevance to “Tempting” would throw my psychic back out, so I backed out of the route.
Temp Ting: Tomorrow we’ll be penitent•Engulfed in guilt/ennui•Must focus on the NOW not then•Please say OMFG.
As a young child I read voraciously from the fairy-tale books on our bookshelves. There were some from Andrew Lang’s series, some Howard Pyle, an Edmund Dulac, and something called something like Seven Stories of Seven Wishes. But the best fairy-story I ever read came later, from J.R.R. Tolkien: “Smith of Wootton Major.” In it Smith, called Starbrow because of a glowing trinket affixed to his forehead, explores the land of Faery and unknowingly meets, and dances with, its Queen. Tolkien’s Queen of Faery reminds me of a friend of mine.
In his book The Natural Way To Draw, outstanding art teacher Kimon Nicolaïdes offers this advice: “Draw anything.” Those two words helped me get through this difficult prompt. I did not want to disgust anyone, so I departed a bit from clinical realism and drew the WORD booger and make it just boogerlike enough to get the concept-point across. I’ve been fighting the urge to blow my nose since I started this thing.
To convey the concept of Heist, I reached into my Baby Boomer childhood and plucked out a cliché cartoon robber holding up a big bag of money. He has the requisite stubble, stocking cap, and mask. Now I’m curious as to how many Robbers actually dressed the part this way. My guess is, pretty close to zero.
Crime/Heist/Theft: Call 911 on high alert/Request enforcement; there’s a dearth/It’s downright baffling how we swerve/Meandering from Surf to Turf/Emergencies don’t wait–they hurt
One with Clay, Image and Text 