Thursday, January 17, 2013

DRAWING CLOUDS

I love to draw shapes that I see in the clouds. Mostly I see animals but I also see things like overturned laundry baskets, ghosts, tanks and tape dispensers. A friend says he always sees beautiful girls. 

I see girls too (above) but usually they're not very beautiful.


You can see all kinds of shapes in clouds. Most of them are silly things. It's a strange fact that the most serious and consequential events in human history probably took place under a sky full of gently drifting pork chops, school buses, kangaroos and pies. 


Sometimes the opposite is true (above): it can happen that nothing of consequence is going on down on the ground but overhead giant battleships race over the horizon to a distant war.


There's something tragic about clouds. They marshal themselves into heroic formations (above) and set out for the horizon with what great purpose, determined to sweep away any obstacle that gets in their path. Sadly most of them are ripped apart before they get there. 

It's amazing how frequently George Washington shows up in the sky. Here's (above) a photo of Washington's head surrounded by flying cats. In a panic Washington thrusts his arms out ahead of him to ward off the cats but they're not to be denied. 


Where I live isn't a good place to draw clouds. Mine is a coastal city where the clouds are often stretched into thin wisps or flattened into massive pancakes. Cumulus are the best clouds to draw and we just don't get enough of them. Jenny, who comments here sometimes, says that's that's a bunch of hooey; she says she sees cumulus all the time when she's out with her horses.

Maybe she's referring to the type of clouds above. Are they cumulus? I'm not sure. They don't immediately suggest anything to me....er...no, wait....hmmmmm, well maybe the clouds on the upper left suggest a ghost chasing a flying beaver....but what about the rest? 


4 comments:

zillustration said...

Taos NM... cloud city.

Joshua Marchant (Scrawnycartoons) said...

It's always a nice contrast in the city between the squares, rectangles, prisms, straight lines, parallel lines, right angles and corners of man-made structures and the organic shapes of the clouds being pierced by tall buildings.
Why does man love the square so?

Unknown said...

I've always loved staring at clouds to see what kinds of interesting shapes I could see. The idea of beauty being in the eye of the beholder is amazingly true when one stares at elusive, mysterious clouds for artistic inspiration!

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

T: Sorry, I accidentally deleted your comment. If you send it again I'll make sure it's put up.