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— Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Thursday, November 19th, 2004
Still largely occupied with work... But I have to get some drawing in:
This sketch of some objects I had on my desk at work shows a hydralisk (a unit from the real-time strategy game Starcraft) confronting the Flaming Carrot, a surrealist superhero created by Bob Burden. As it generally takes heavily armored troops with flamethrowers or energy weapons to defeat a hydralisk, the Carrot is in great danger; however, perhaps having already realized that his bullets are just bouncing off the thing, he is readying his super pogo stick behind his back for a quick getaway.
I thought the Hydralisk with its complex curves would be the hardest thing to draw, but it was relatively easy; I had the most trouble drawing the Carrot. This is perhaps due to Betty Edward's concept (in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain) of having one's preconceived symbols of what something should look like get in the way of drawing the actual appearance of a thing, as when you ask someone to draw a flag and they draw a rectangle, despite the fact that flags are rarely seen flat out but are usually draped over or hanging from something. The symbol for flag in most people's minds is a flat rectangle, so that's what they draw, and since they have little practice in drawing folds in cloth (which is admittedly a complex artistic task) the symbol overwhelms the reality of what their eyes are seeing. In this case, my brain thinks it knows what a human figure is like, whereas it has no predefined symbols for the hydralisk.
And by the way, they're called Action Figures... Okay, okay, they're dolls. What the hell.
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