Animal jigsaw

I stole this idea from an artist I met in Val d’Aosta who makes beautiful jigsaw puzzles and sculptures of intertwined animal shapes. You start with a simple animal shape, and then you have to use as many of the surfaces as possible of the original shape to create another animal, and so on. There is a technical word for this in the creativity industry: “forced fitting” or “forced association.”

random creatures from my subconscious

These creatures started to emerge from a sheet of paper which had a couple of lines on it, from trying out a pen to see if it would work. I then added some more random lines and squiggles and more creatures emerged. Then I found, on the internet, that someone, a colleague in the field of innovation consultancy, has already patented this idea (ok, not really). Check it out: http://www.jpb.com/doodles/exercises.php

Inspired by Jackson Pollock

I read, while in the loo recently, that the amazing thing about Jackson Pollock’s art, which I confess I was never able to work out for myself, is that his art is so non-represenatational that his splotches defy being able to impose any kind of familiar meaning on them. This is quite an achievement, as we are generally of capable of seeing familiar things in the most random patterns, e.g. clouds, the moon’s craters, and Leonardo da Vinci was paticularly fond of tree bark and dilapidated walls for inspiration. There’s even a blog called http://facesinplaces.blogspot.com/ devoted to collecting images of all the objects people can see faces in. So here’s my attempt at meaning-defying shapes.

slightly different scribble art

These are two doodles just based on a swirly line that became a kind of jungle theme.

and more scribble art

More scribble art…

Scribble art

Sometimes I can do good doodles by scribbling in pencil all over the page, then staring at it for a bit, until I see some figures emerge, then I draw the things I see emerging from the mess, and then I colour them in ink to make them look pretty. Here are a couple of them.