Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Art By Committee: Tookah

The 15th of the month is the day for a group sketch game called "Art by Committee." I share an excerpt from a science fiction story and you visualize it.

This month's quote was:
“Behind the bar, polishing four glasses at the same time with his blue tentacles, was the Tookah. Two of his three eyes didn’t bother to look up, but it was the third one, the upper eye, the sleepy one that appears bored by everything but never misses anything. That one sleepily looked over at me and then blinked and opened wide.”

This time I didn’t use a quote from a science fiction novel. Instead, the excerpt is from a radio play called “The Tookah's Tales” by Tom Lopez of ZBS Foundation.

Your solutions were, as always, a delightful surprise. We all had the challenge of figuring out how to clean out four bar glasses with four tentacles.

Mark Heng
Blog

Mei-Yi Chun
Website


Daniel Zhang
Image

Andy Wales
Blog


Rob Hummer
Photobucket

Marisa Bryan
Flickr

Roberta Baird
Image
Blog

Michael Geissler

Image

Blog

Jeremy HughesLink to Blog.

Arthur Keegan
Flickr

And the one that Jeanette and I did.

The next quote for May is: “The harper began to sing. His deep voice was fine and sweet, eloquently expressing his intent. He sang of the bitterness of defeat and the gut-wrenching carnage of war. He sang of boys…”


Have fun! Please scale your JPG to 300 pixels across and compress it as much as possible. Title it with your name, send it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC. Please let me know in your email the full URL of the link to a larger image or your blog or website so people can see your image in all its glory and learn more about your other work. Please have your entries in by the 12th of May. I'll post the results May 15.
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If you like bizarre science fiction audio adventures, check out "The Tookah's Tales" by ZBS link.

Tom Lopez adapted Dinotopia to the world of audio: link.

5 comments:

Jeremy said...

i didn't see my entry i had sent in... here is the link to the entry on my blog:

http://photoatomic.blogspot.com/2009/03/art-by-committee-001.html

Unknown said...

I would not want to drink out of any of those glasses!

Daroo said...

Great submissions by all!

Jim, I especially like the cartooning in yours -- any chance you're a fan of J.C. Mezieres, the french comic book artist? He created "Valerian agent spatio-temporel" Later he also did viz-dev on The Fifth Element (inexplicably, one of my favorite movies -- its like Blade Runner meets cotton candy).

Besides a similar tone in your caricature of aliens, I believe you two also share the distinction of heavily "influencing" George Lucas on the Star Wars movies (albeit different episodes).

James Gurney said...

Jeremy, sorry I missed you submission. It's up now!

Andy, the glasses aren't so clean, but the bar talk is amazing.

Thanks, Daroo for your kind words. Yes, I do love Mezieres's work. I have a copy of three or four of the Valerian stories, and they're fabulous. And yes, the movies influence the artists and the artists influence the movies.

Unknown said...

Your sketch is brilliant, Jim! I love this character--looks like he'd be fun to animate.