It's a Bird! It's a Pla...What is it?

Still playing with blind contouring, finding imaginary creatures in blobs and trying to learn to have fun with art.  I so wanted to be (among many things) an artist when I was younger.  In particular, I wanted to be an artist like my mother, who was a natural at it.  But I was a perfectionist.  If it didn't look realistic, like my mother's drawings, then it wasn't good.  If it wasn't good, it wasn't art.  So, after many years of struggling to be as good an artist as my mother, and failing - in my eyes, anyway - I quit trying.  Then I stumbled upon some drawings and paintings by Carla Sonheim (previous post) and was inspired to try again.

Will I ever become as good as my mother was?  No, on many levels, including art.  But it no longer matters.  What I do now is for me, for fun and to share with friends.

The drawing in this post was an attempt to do another blind contour drawing, where you close your eyes (or at least not look at the paper or other surface you're sketching on) and just let your hand/pencil go where it will.  The key is to be loose, relax - trust the process, instead of trying to control the outcome.  Have fun.  Live in the now, in the moment.  (Good life lessons, too!)  The sketch below was intended to be a bird.  No one type of bird, just whatever developed. 

Well, what developed didn't strike me as a bird, but it made me laugh, laugh hard, so it served its purpose.  Meet Rico.

 

 

When Rico hatched from his egg, his parents knew he was special.  His siblings, all normal-looking tadpoles, asked if 'special' was another word for weird.  His father said he couldn't believe that millions of years of frog evolution could be undone in one instant.  Rico's mother worried that having his gills on top of his head would make him an easier, more visible, target for the fish which preyed upon tads and young frogs.

 

As his brothers and sisters grew legs and lost their tails, moving through the expected stages of froglet development, Rico simply grew larger, eventually reaching a mass of nearly a kilo and a length of half a meter.  As you can imagine, his size, not to mention the strange placement of his gills, dissuaded other creatures from trying to eat him. 

 

His brothers went on to chase female frogs every spring.  Rico chased bubbles.  He was obsessed with them.  Rico knew everything there was to know about bubbles: what caused them, how they were able to rise from the depths of heavy water to burst upon the surface, their usual lifespan; how they were, in fact, an engineering and physics marvel - like bumblebees - and all the wonderful things that could be made using the bubble shape.  He liked to point out that frogs' very lives began in bubbles, that there would be no frogs, or toads, or salamanders, perhaps all life, were it not for bubbles or bubble technology.

 

Rico lived to be 17 years old, having outlived several generations of siblings and their offspring as well as his parents.  He contented himself chasing and studying and admiring bubbles until the day he died. 

 

Death came swiftly to Rico.  He got caught up in the cavitation produced by a 300-horsepower Evinrude, so focused on the bubbles that he didn't see the spinning propeller that produced them.  He never knew what hit him.