Assignment 4: Never Seen, Never Will

This weeks task is all about interpretation, more so than usual. While all of the prior tasks might have been interpretable in certain aspects, as I'm sure is obvious from comparing our interpretations to the examples in the video, this one pulls interpretation into centre stage.

This is the video link

The rules of the task are thus:

1. Think of something which both exists and has not be seen by yourself before.

2. Depict this unseen subject in some way.

3. Upload to mass appeal

Fairly simple stuff with a heck of a lot of possibility. As it happened, this week Lucy and I were separated. She had left for Birmingham the very night the assignment went live, and I left for London just as she came back, only to return today. This is why it's taken this long for us to complete the assignment.

We were lucky with this one. The task is so subjective, it would be much more appropriate for us to do one each than to work on one together, and we were able to use our separation to our advantage. While Lucy was away, she would find something for me to depict and describe its features in as much detail as she could in a single text, I would then try to draw this thing base on the text. I would also do the same for her while I was in London.

This was the text she sent me:

I saw a street art today in Birmingham.

It is an animal which is made of sand.

It is laying on the floor.

It looks very strong.

Its body looks like a beast which is as big as a dog.

Its chest makes it looks strong.

It had medium length tail.

It has triangle-shaped ears (normal size).

Its eyes are like black berries (round)

It has a pig nose.

It has two vertical frown lines above the middle of two eyes with a frowning look.

The shape of its mouth is an inverted U shape.

Its cheek is kinda prolapsed.

It has four paws with four toes/fingers, which are quite sharp.

In my eyes, this creatures looks a bit like a pig and a dog. But it is not fat.

This is what I came up with.

It's been a long time since I've drawn anything, so I was a bit uncertain as to how this would turn out. I deviated a bit from the description, because the creature that was in my mind wasn't lying down, and had a much longer tail than whatever it was Lucy saw. The vein like cracks was something I added as I imagined how  a creature made of sand might move, how it would lose grains with every step, with every breath, with every beat of the heart.

When Lucy saw it, she took a few minutes to look at it, tilted her head a few times, and then said a single word, "different", before looking at it a bit more. She said she could recognise her description in the picture, but could not see the creature she had described. 

I sent this to Lucy:


I am looking at a painting of a landscape.
It is evening.
The sky is blue, but there is a large cloud which casts a dark purple shadow along the view.
As you go closer to the horizon, the colour of the clouds goes from purple to red, with the sky yellow at the horizon.
There are trees silhouetted against the yellow sky, large palms and trees with scraggly branches.
The trees are not close together, but are also not far apart.
At the base of the trees are dark bushes which can not be distinguished from another.
The trees are far from the viewpoint, and so appear small.
Tall grass spans the length of the scene between the trees and us.
The grass is dark, yet not black like the bushes.
The grass reflects the yellow sky slightly.

What follows is her image along with her thoughts.

When David described what he saw in London in a message, I was quite happy to imagine what the painting looks like. After reading the description, I had the general idea about the look of the painting. I decided to use my PC to create my imaginary painting based on the message. I wasn’t quite sure about the level of blue sky, grass and bushes in the evening. So I just used common sense to draw based on my understanding of colours. During the whole process, it reminded me of drawing a picture of Doraemon by using my PC. Therefore it was fun though it didn’t look as good as I expected. Probably I couldn’t figure out the transition of the changing colour in the picture. I tried really hard but failed. Overall, I enjoyed this experience! 


In conclusion, this task was intended to be about imagining that which we have not experienced, but we made it more about communication. The onus was not only on the one drawing to depict the idea, but on the one describing as well. Translating visual information into language, and then back again. In this way, a lot of information is lost in the change between mediums, but additionally a lot more information is gained, creating a different yet recognisable outcome.