September 2014 – Orange

So September is here. September; the year of our lord two thousand and fourteen. Today sees the beginning of the 37th monthly Pictonaut Challenge. The mathematically inclined among you should no doubt realise that 37 divided by 12 is 3.083. Three and a bit. Which means that the Pictonaut Challenge is entering its fourth year. It’s all a little hard to take in. I expected to run it for a couple of months before getting lazy or bored, and give up on the whole thing. But no. The damn things has latched itself onto me and simply refuses to let go. It has become the most dangerous of things, it has become a habit. So here we go, number 37.

September seems to have become a month of haunting faces. The tears of the girl in the rain in 2011, the glare of the old Yemeni woman in 2013. September 2012 was an image of a desert, but 2 out of 3 isn’t bad. I saw no particular reason to move away from this general and statistically prevailing theme. For September 2014’s month of faces we have Orange.

Those eyes. They’re piercing. And the green? It looks so unearthly, almost unnatural, yet it contrasts so sharply and so vividly with the orange fabric. The thing about using a face is that there’s at once both so little and so much to use and work with. A dilemma of where on earth to start, but once the inertia of the beginning is gone it can snowball so rapidly and take on a life of its own.

I think I found this image somewhere on tumblr, or possibly pinterest. Which has made tracking down its actual source and attributing it properly an absolute nightmare, which makes me feel kind of shitty. Because proper attribution and acknowledgement is an important thing on the internet.

I had a mixed experience with this month’s wordascope. I rather rapidly decided that I was lacking in ideas and promptly decided to hold true to the emergency response of any fantasy fan “Fuckit; dragons.” This naturally spiralled into a whole morass of potential ideas because, you know, dragons. Dragons are awesome. So with a plan and an outline in place, I spent the better chunk of the month larking about with what essentially amounted to a 1,000 word preamble. You know, the set-up, the introduction, the bit before you get to what you’re actually trying to say. This was, perhaps, tactically inadvisable. Primarily because it resulted in a mad-dash to get it finished last night, perhaps not as satisfactorily as I might have hoped. On the upside I got to muck around with some not entirely awful ideas and had a fairly good time expanding the strange universe in which The Starwatcher and The Watcher of Stars occur. Though I decided to tone down the general “alien” feel a bit.

The Rogue Verbumancer – Here be dragons

The Mick – Soulful!

James Clayton – Those Eyes so Green <Edit: Added 4th Jan 2014>