Marionette

I managed to work on the drawing all day. It began as a promising mechanical pencil drawing of half an elf-boy with elbows pointing skyward, his mutant hands (like the hidden hand of the mutant cabbie from Total Recall) hanging just above the paper’s bottom edge. His left claw held some kind of split hilt that exuded vapors; similar trails climbed to the top of the page, terminating in various floral blooms. I added a few other small faces for good measure. Then I drew a face on the elf-boy’s torso (reminded me of the demonic torso-faces from Ghouls n’ Ghosts), which may have been the beginning of the end. Then I started to color in the torso-face in semi-random colors, small batches of color that usually started dark and ended lightly. These brief varying gradients started to extend throughout the entire drawing, so now I was infecting the elf-boy with color-band gradients. At some point I decided that the entire elf-boy should be the necklace of another figure, so I drew in a rough neck and head that grew from the elf-boy (covering up the aforementioned floral blooms). It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was a worse idea than the torso-face, so I cut down the paper to remove the (more) hopeless upper half. I drew a loose border around the remaining drawing (pretty much just the elf-boy, though the drawing now went off the top of the paper) and filled in most of the bordered-in area with dark graphite.