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.

What made Aggie mad was that her...

Curling her toes in frustration, Aggie flew into an internal rage. Rather, she curled into an internal rage, her metaphorical guts clenching -- imagine spleen, pancreas, liver, and other squishy unseeables sprouting little hands and holding onto one another tightly, as if participating in an organ club's Circle of Hope. Probably an image of the spleen clenching its fists would be enough here, but Aggie's incensement was florid and grotesque (and perhaps a tiny bit redundant).

And what was the igniter of Aggie's indignation that sent her innards eddying? I'm compelled to blame her toe-stubbing (the twelfth that morning: two whole toes more than most whole folks have toes to stub), or how she burnt her wrist on Mitzy's first birthday liverwurst (the gaudy "1ST" candle slid nicely into the pork cake), but those were all comparatively parenthetical incidents (incidental, really, to what initially lit Aggie's ire).

System Stutter (linked)

Argus-eyed
Belated autopsy
Belligerent belvedere
Breakfast disaster
Crazy ersatz
Craven misrepresentation
Effervescent prepubescent
Elusive sieve
Empirically impractical
Flagrant gratuities
Frisky retriever
Grated eraser
Grievous leverage
Glue gel
Imperfect prefect
Incandescent adolescent
Laconic lacuna
Mischievous applesauce
Monsoon panoply
Parasitic pentameter
Pleasant palimpsest
Precluded recluse
Religious integer
Stanchion luncheon