Anthropomorphism #4

There is a little rock climbing wall in a park near home that we like to visit sometimes.
While staring at the wall for too long one day, it transformed before me. If I was going to be all fancy I would say that it reminded me of an Yves Tanguy painting. This a Baker Smith blog post though and we see turtles in clouds and Charlie Brown‘s face in trivets, so what the wall really reminded me of that day was an exploding Mr Potato Head. I photographed some rocks with my phone then assembled them. Doubting Thomas here he is, half-baked – an alternate Mr Potato Head.

Inside of a Dog

Recently we grappled with a boy character in one of our rough stories. The boy was doing boy-like things with boy-like behaviour, but something was missing from the drafts. We changed the boy character into a dog of uncertain heritage, and voila! The story still worked, and now the character was free to move about in exciting, unexpected ways.

Just how far should the boy be morphed when visualised? Should he be rendered as a regular dog with a collar? A smart casual town dog? Should he have a hint of residual boyishness? After some scribbles, the character had a resolution, of sorts. He would be an upright dog in a pair of sparkling red shoes of course! Although, maybe, he is still actually, kind of a boy underneath that fur – on the inside, waiting to break out. That’s not my read, he looks dog enough to me. Besides, some cigar chomping joker once said that inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

A familiar face

It can be hard to look at certain objects and not see a face. Resting in the shadows of trees, or in the raised metal of drain covers on a footpath, faces are everywhere. Well, I think so, and I’m not alone. The want to anthropomorphise is deeply imbedded in the human brain. Thankfully, the faces I see are benevolent ones, like the one springing from this silicon rubber trivet in my kitchen. It took me by surprise one day, looking for all the world like the head of Charlie Brown, and he has never left the kitchen. Every time I look at the trivet, there he is. Good grief!