Forum: Challenge Arena


Subject: February Challenge: Puns!

hauksdottir opened this issue on Feb 08, 2008 · 71 posts


hauksdottir posted Wed, 20 February 2008 at 10:36 AM

TheBryster,

We're having fun playing with words and images, making puns in obvious (visual) ways.  You know how children play with their food?  Remember that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the grown man turned a plate of mashed potatoes into the Mother Ship's landing site?  Yes, he was playing with his food, but in a rather more recognizably artistic fashion. ;)

Let's assume that your primary tool is Bryce and your focus is creating landscapes.  Where do your interests lie?  The classics?  Homer sang of a "wine dark sea"... Ruby waves, Greek ship, crewman filling his beaker over the side!  Astronomy?  The sky is full of imagery like a "Milky Way" with white jugs in lieu of stars.  Or have astronauts discovering mermaids in the Sea of Tranquility.  Genealogy (ok, I paused and peeked):  Family tree!  (In fact, trees are almost too full of puns, given that bark, branch, root, leaf, etc., all have many meanings.)

You can slap a different and unexpected texture upon your deserts to get desserts... rock candy for the pun-within-a-pun!  A river bank?  Well, bank is a chair, and a place where finances are transferred and held, and you can bank coals and airplanes and billiard balls, so almost anything with a steep slope can be punned upon.  As for river?  Well, the word actually means that which cuts or divides (rive, riven): whether it is the Styx or the Rubicon, crossing the river usually is more significant than following it.

You can start with a terrain or with a prop... let's say that you need an excuse to use a loom... looming disaster, warped threads, spinning a yarn, shuttle diplomacy... you can take a simple prop and go out in any direction to find the humor in it.

I'm going to try to create something pretty this month as my real entry, but meanwhile have quickly thrown up humorous bits to nudge others into light-heartedness.

Carolly