I need to experiment on you guys, so in comments, please describe what you see in the above image. There are no right answers; this is a creative challenge (but I will tell you what the image actually is once all the comments are in.) Also, if you're not able to view the image due to work screening or some other glitch, just throw your name in the hat.
Leave your description or name in comments to this post by midnight EST tonight (that's Thursday, June 5, 2008). I'll draw one name at random from everyone who participates and grant the winner a BookWish.* This giveaway is open to everyone on the planet, even if you've won something here at PBW in the past.
*A BookWish is any book of your choice, up to a maximum cost of $30.00 US dollars, that is available for order from an online bookseller. I will cover any shipping that is involved.
To me, it looks like a horse, looking back over its shoulder.
ReplyDeleteA dying unicorn.
ReplyDeleteI see a woman leaning down as though she were reaching back into the void that gave birth to her.
ReplyDeleteSince I've just come back from the UK, I have to say it looks like the Earth from 40,000 feet through a veil of clouds at sunrise.
ReplyDeleteOn the left I see a ghost next to a bush playing ring around the rosey with an angel, who has multicolored wings. In the background, I see a screaming child riding a horse.
ReplyDeleteYes, I know, I need therapy. LOL!
Okay, I totally *honestly*, at first look, saw Admiral Ackbar from "Return of the Jedi". There's his one eye, and his lips ...
ReplyDeleteMan, I've got a weird imagination.
— Bonz
i see a map of the world with mountains.
ReplyDeleteweahter with clouds. rain
kim h
Washed wool, and the colours have all run together.
ReplyDeleteTwo green hands, one splayed, the other fisted with the index finger pointing at the other hand.
ReplyDeleteI think I can see a human profile, gazing upwards with thick pouty lips, a big nose and a mop of hair.
ReplyDeleteDo I get a second guess? I think I can also see a green turtle with forelegs spread out on the left side, swimming out.
A hand being held out to someone with eyes closed, head bowed.
ReplyDeleteAurora borealis, especially with the falling colors.
ReplyDeleteBetta fish. Very shimmery bettas with long fins.
ReplyDeleteI see a church.
ReplyDeleteI think it looks like a woman watching falling leaves.
ReplyDeleteTo me it looks like Northern Lights or the different colors you could see in space with gaz clouds.
ReplyDeleteI see a person looking at their hands...or something their holding in their hands.
ReplyDeleteOh, you wanted creative interpretation? I was going to say silk scarf material that's been attempted to be tie-dyed but not tied, more colour dipped into various dyes. I must not be such a lateral thinker.
ReplyDeleteI used to make my Easter eggs like this as kid.
Uhm, I see a poodle's profile, looking left and licking a daffodil. Or it could be a doggie treat...I'm sure I look long enough I'll find Jesus.
There's a Stone Age woman, shaking her braceleted fist .. and a glowing green rock .. and the moment has been fossilized by the power of this magic glowing rock.
ReplyDeleteAny moment now, they will awaken, and she will use this Rock of Power, to, erm, start her own jewelry business.
I see an old lady at an open doorway, the house one in a dark, forbidding forest.
ReplyDeleteI tried to see one thing but I keep seeing many things. To me it looks like a collage. I see a few faces (particularly one in the top right corner), a flower and fish. Wierd I know but thats what I see. It will be interesting when you tell us what this really is.
ReplyDeleteA lil' girl holding a balloon~
ReplyDeleteIt looks like a nebula, the place where stars are born.
ReplyDeleteThe colors are all kinds of gasses that will coalesce into stars, eventually.
Suelder
I see a dog and an owl into a brightly coloured forest.
ReplyDeleteI saw a few frogs and a lizard. If I look at it in a different way, I see a purple owl.
ReplyDeleteI see a green dragon who's wings touch the left side of the page. He's puffing out some green smoke that floats to the bottom of the page. You can see his eye near the orange blotch at the top-middle of the page.
ReplyDeleteI saw an angel and the reaper facing off against each other. Angel in the upper right corner and reaper in the lower left.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like a tissue paper collage. Or maybe a closeup of a nebula.
ReplyDeleteI see a dragon, and he's being birthed by a storm.
ReplyDeleteYes, I am nuts. But you should know that by now.
It almost looks like the pond water we just looked at through my daughter's microscope. The green thing on the left side even looks sorta like a microscopic bug we found.
ReplyDeleteWell, the right blotchy area on the upper right reminds me of some kind of half human half quadruped type creature. The white blotchy area on the bottom left reminds me of a horse mounted knight.
ReplyDeleteI think I may see a unicorn, but really I'm not sure that I see anything. However, I love the colors. If this came in a yarn, I would so be there.
ReplyDeleteSandy L
I see what looks like the barest scrap of a man's profile in the upper right hand corner. I can see his eye and eyebrow. Just a bit in front of the eyebrow, on the diagonal line, I see what looks like one of those surgical lamps the dentists/doctors use, with the ultra bright light. It's something parabola shaped, maybe with some kind of spindles sticking out of it or something.
ReplyDeleteThen in the bottom right hand corner I can't decide if that's a person raising their arm or if it's a horse reared up on two legs, throwing its head back.
In the lower left corner, I think I see letters.
I think it looks like a view of our planet from far away.
ReplyDeleteI see two white horses running through a storm.
ReplyDeleteI can see a blind little girl at the top crouching/lying down (the pink oval is her face, the red is the end of her hair at about shoulder level, the almost horizontal line in blue running from the centre to the left is the line of her back). I also see a llama in the pale bit in the bottom corner. A llama with a very big/tall bum.
ReplyDeleteThe overall impression, however, is of a storm.
Wolverine
I think it looks like a nebula, with a few bright points that are like stars. Or maybe the path of the stargates in SG1 from the outside.
ReplyDeleteThe Northern Lights. But I got Alaska on the brain right now.
ReplyDeleteI see a pig's face in the top right corner, a tiny black cat with glowing eyes just below the red part that looks like a bow tie, and moss growing on the bottom right-hand corner. The white blur in the bottom left corner looks like a woman in a flowing dress riding a donkey with long ears.
ReplyDeleteIt's probably a picture of you somehow, and I'll feel stupid in a few minutes. :)
Heather
The green is branches of a mountain pine and the background is a roiling, raging storm acoming.
ReplyDeleteclbarta
From the texture, it looks like a scarf that was tie-dyed in an unconventional way.
ReplyDeleteIt looks kind of like the sky in deep space. Not that I'd know much about deep space :)...
Or a meadow, with flowers and grass.
:)
I see the beginnings of a gorgeous jeweltoned quilt.
ReplyDelete:-) Keep me outa the hat, please.
i see a woman in a white dress being chased by a man; she is looking back at him while she runs through a forest.
ReplyDeleteUhhhhhhhh nothing. Only thing I see is a batch of colors, it's pretty but that's it. Otherwise I'd say something was tie-died.
ReplyDeleteI don't do well with modern paintings like this, to me they're just a batch of colors, they seldom mean anything to me.
Sorry Lynn
Shaggy (from Scooby-Doo) holding a bag (of money) in front of a burrow. Standing in front of a time travel ring from a book I read as a young child. I wish I could remember the title. They protagonists (two brothers I believe) end up going to the Stone Age and bringing back a cave-girl with them.
ReplyDeleteJulieB
I see a person with a sword, destroying something. The resulting explosion has released a swirl of color and possibly a turtle and a dragonfly as well. . .
ReplyDeleteDiDi
All I can think of is the aurora borealis.
ReplyDeleteI see a profile (facing left) of an individual as seen through the eyes of a being whose vision is very different from that of humans.
ReplyDeleteA dragon flying over the Caribbean Islands.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like the inside of a kaleidoscope. (Sorry, abstract art never did resonate much with me.)
ReplyDeleteLierally: It looks to me like the earth with clouds colored like the northern lights...
ReplyDeleteFiguratively: It looks like a rampant unicorn, with it's horn stabbing a shield...
I really don't know what I see, but one of the blobs sort of looks like a spider.
ReplyDeleteI see the purple phoenix enfolding the universe.
ReplyDeleteI see two bears. One on the far left, middle, charging in from the side. On the right half, head and shoulders of the second, posed as though standing.
ReplyDeleteOkay, my first impression was that the big thing in the center is a skull (kind of a momento mori thing), but then it looks like there is a black cat looking out of the skull's right eye. But then the more I look, I in the skull's left side I see the figure of a woman standing with her left arm bent at the elbow and her right down by her side. The green guy in the lower left kind of reminds me of a Transformer. The more I look, the more I see. Is this a collage of some sort?
ReplyDeletea world map.
ReplyDelete1. I see a plasma map layered on top of a bump map based on a turbulent cloud filter. :) Well, except for the white, that never seems to show up on plasma filters.
ReplyDelete2. Reminds me of the drop cloth of a painter. Specially one of those smaller ones when you wipe the brush clean and you are using good oils.
3. For abstract views, I'm going to go with a small pig seeking out its mother, sorry that it can find her as it is resting its front paws on the feeding trough.
Northern/Western Hemisphere as seen through southeasterly variously colored movement.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm also still in withdrawal from pain meds after my May 29th surgery. :)
At first I saw bears like Teddy Bears and I'm going to stick with that choice.
ReplyDeleteI see two people (possibly one older), side by side, looking at us pensively...
ReplyDeleteI totally see an oil slick.
ReplyDeleteI guess if I really wanted to draw it out, see something other than the surface, I see a horse and a deer.
But still. I see an oil slick :)
It looks like lots of things to me. My first thought was a rag or piece of textured paper leftover from cleaning paint brushes (maybe watercolors?)
ReplyDeleteOther thoughts:
paper-mache (I'm spelling that wrong)--as a kid we used to decorate stuff with bits of colored tissue paper glued onto a surface, and the colors would runtogether as they were drying.
tye-dying or batik fabric.
In any case, I love the colors. If it is a piece of fabric, I hope it becomes a nice scarf or flowy skirt!
hmm...as I read other commenter's notes, I realize I am interpreting the question differently. I read "please describe what you see", and I'm a bit more of a realist (strike that, I'm an impressionist...but definitely not an abstract artist).
ReplyDeletePerhaps I should have tried to be a bit more poetic than "rag used for washing brushes"...something more like:
I see the beauty in the humblest aspects of the creative process.
(I could go on with a metaphor for writing about how the cut scenes and pre-writing activities hold as much intrinsic value as a polished book, but that might be going a bit aboveboard, and possibly look like I'm brownnosing. Or showing off, albeit poorly.).
Flowers in the rain...
ReplyDeleteI see a wolf
ReplyDeletelooks like a tie-dyed cloth... in the design i see a skull in the right upper corner and on the left i see a green dragon breathing fire.
ReplyDeleteOK, you asked for it!
ReplyDeleteA human-skull-headed insect-bodied demon swooping down to torment a guy in a white bunny suit riding a white horse....
Sorry. I'm very literal.
:)
I see a weapon-wielding human figure on the back of a horse (maybe a unicorn) facing down a ghostly figure.
ReplyDeleteAustralia has developed a mouth and is trying to eat New Zealand Pac-Man style.
ReplyDeleteThe image is a color enhanced image of Venus. We are looking through a veil of clouds.
ReplyDeleteTo me it looks like the birth place of stars - a nebula.
ReplyDeleteAnd if I were being literal I'd be boring so I won't tell you what else I think it looks like.
-Julie
It looks like one of two things. 1) One of those custom dyed shirts or skirts that one can find at any open air market or 2) one of those pictures taken in the deep parts of outer space where nobody but a satellite camera can reach.
ReplyDeleteAck, I'm not the only one... I just went and read the other comments. Nebulae rock.
ReplyDeleteI see a rather ticked off snake getting picked up by a hand with delicate fingernails.
ReplyDeleteAt first I just saw pretty abstract colours then I thought it looked more like a nebula.
ReplyDeleteTo me it looks like a picture of some far off galaxy. There's something very off-worldy about it.
ReplyDeleteThis is reminisent of what an insane person (???) sees as he or she floats about in the inner spaces of the soul.
ReplyDeleteI see the heart of an opal with a star.
ReplyDeleteKathleen
I see Leonardo Da Vinci. And also the top-down view of a snowman wearing a leather hunting cap (like Elmer Fudd wears). And glitter!
ReplyDeletethe orange bit at the top center looks like a dragonfly to me. The rest... pretty colors. :)
ReplyDeleteI see someone praying on the right side and what looks like a unicorn in the lower left corner.
ReplyDeleteI see a spacewalker with a gorgeous view of a nebula behind her/him. The dark green on the left is the suit with light puffs of gas for movement around the waist. It looks like he/she's reaching for something.
ReplyDeleteLOL. Everyone's interpretations are so interesting :) Awesome stuff.
Sheets of multi-colored tissue paper that have gotten wet and the colors have bled through.
ReplyDeleteSheesh, after reading all the great, imaginative comments, mine seems like stale white toast. LOL
Valerie Everhart
I see a giant spider spinning a web getting ready to munch on something.
ReplyDeleteI see a mother holding a babe to her breast (breastfeeding?), and over her lap, if one is looking from above. The mother would be the figure on the right, in the hues of violet and purple, the babe in her lap, and against her bosom, mostly in green, on the left.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like a distorted photo of a stained glass window.
ReplyDeleteI see an angel with an aura.
ReplyDeleteMary2
There's a horse in it, but for the rest it looks like the sky here every afternoon for a week now, when the thunderstorms come in.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like a tie-dyed map.
ReplyDeleteLooks like a tie-dye gone horribly wrong to me. Although the two eyes peeping out to the left suggest someone's been skinned and painted.
ReplyDeleteEw!
I see a dragon, wings back, back feet coming in for a landing, breathing a cloud of fire/gas/whathaveyou. That's on the left.
ReplyDeleteOn the right a fainter image of another dragon pulling back from the breath.
Below, either mountaintops or very tall trees.
Anywhichway, it,'s a cool picture.
Is it OK to not like purple?
ReplyDeleteI totally like the painting, though. What I see? A fox, of course! With a ribbon!
(No, I'm not taking acid... Just a vivid imagination, I guess.)
The first thing I thought when I saw this picture was that it was an image taken of deep space (with the Hubble perhaps).
ReplyDelete(You don't have to throw my name into the hat, just wanted to participate in your experiment)
a very sad person...or a tie dyed shirt haha
ReplyDeleteI see a young girl holding a book open on her lap, while a menacing older man hovers nearby.
ReplyDeleteEither '60s tie-dye or wet "sheets of multi-colored tissue paper."
ReplyDeleteIt's very obviously a monkey chasing a stoned cat around a mulberry bush while wearing a top hat and blowing soap bubbles.
ReplyDeleteI see dead people---a younger man in the lower left who is facing left and looking contemplative. Slightly above him to the right is an old man ( who is also looking left) and appears to be very sad. I see several other faces throughout and one appears reptilian, another burned and skinless. I see claws reaching out. It looks very apocalyptic to me.
ReplyDeleteI'm not on drugs but I may need some. : )
I think I see a horse in the bottom left corner and bits of forest scenery, but that's about it.
ReplyDeleteI think I see fairies hiding in flowers--their faces, arms, and wings showing through.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like a butterfly in a garden to me, as seen from underneath; when I was a kid, I used to hide under and behind bushes and look up and out at the world.
ReplyDeleteI see a dead man looking out in the middle with a pirahna on the right with claws reaching out on the side. I also see an old man (like a mummy on the bottom right with his mouth open in a scream).
ReplyDeleteTerri W.