September 2012 – The Journey

September now draws to a close. I nights are beginning to get fat and heavy; longer; darker. We’re well and truly rolling into the twilight of the year. At the start of this month I gave you a picture which I entitled The Journey. An image which is quite clearly of a seriously massive [technical term] desert. There’s something perverse about this. Not in of itself, but simply because large chunks of my home country and the surrounding regions were very recently, mostly underwater. I’m sure a better, more philosophical man than I could make some point about dissonance and duality, but my general reaction was largely composed of a simple and succinct “woah.” A ten foot rise in water levels generally has that effect when you’re not being directly effected by it. At the end of the day sand basically just like water right? Except less wet, more solid and chemically different. That si to say, not like water at all. But it does however share a propensity for eating things just at a considerably slower rate. Flood water thrashes and bashes and necks its food like a mad gannet with a gizzard full of PCP. Sand takes it slow, it nibbles and savours. It’s a connoisseur of the devouring of human endeavour.

The image in question is taken from the critically acclaimed PS3 game Journey. I saw some video demos of it at some point in the dark arse end of 2011 and fell head over heels in love with its aesthetic. I don’t own a PS3 so my chances of actually playing the game are slim, but that doesn’t stop me from gazing lovingly at screenshots from it.  There’s something haunting about the image, but also a wistful sense of hope. I’m not sure who the artist responsible is but I can say that the game’s artistic director is Matt Nava and the character artist is Ke Jiang. After the slightly heavier literary bent I gave last month’s Pictonaut Challenge I think an injection of some fantastical whimsy is in order.

With the picture at our disposal let’s throw on our cloaks of adventure, pour over the map of excitement and head out into the vast, endless sands of the desert of imagination.

This month once again saw James Clayton waltzing out into the Pictonaut arena. Getting his wordascope all nice and finished by the 10th. And he really got his philosophy on for his effort. It’s almost deep. I also received the first tweeted wordascope, courtesy of Laundry_King. A brief tale of only 72 characters which has a kind of self-contained beauty all on its own. It simply reads “Man looks out over fourth dimensional wasteland. His future is terrible.”

The slightly longer tales of myself and Mr Clayton can be found here:

James Clayton – Nothing is, in of itself, something

Ali George – Lights, camera, action!

The Rogue Verbumancer – What lies ahead?

The Mick– Oh what a tangled web life does weave

Susan Tarrier – You’ve just got to keep walking

Tonks – Dreams of home

The ill-advised venture into the realms of fiction began here and drew to a close here.