Challenge 'Ate' Begins - The Unspeakable Thing Under the Bed

In keeping with tradition, I'll open the Painting Challenge with its first entry. Doing this allows me to 1) play the gracious host, 2) briefly stoke my ego by being first on the scoreboard. (A misplaced sense of moral superiority which is always cruelly squashed by the avalanche of follow-on painters who are far more industrious.)

For this, our eighth edition of the Challenge, the theme is 'Challenge Ate', and so celebrates all things scary, creepy and monstrous. I could easily go off on a tangent on how this could reflect the socio-political landscape of parts of our world today, but lets keep this civil and focus instead on kinder, gentler monsters, such as fire breathing dragons, rapacious werewolves and perhaps even dread Cthulhu.  

Mulling over what I would do for this entry, I thought back to my childhood, remembering what I believed to be particularly frightening and monstrous at the time. I clearly remember having a puppet that seemed quite scary at night, and the moon-shadows of the trees outside my window could be quite unsettling, but the thing that really made me bring the covers to my nose was the thought that something unspeakable could be lurking underneath my bed. 

What could be under there? Was it listening for me go to sleep before it would make its move? If I ran, would it catch me before I made it to my bedroom door? Should I peak under my bedframe to make sure I was safe? Thinking of all these things while peering over the top of the sheets was such wonderfully delicious torture. 

It's a wonder I got any sleep at all during those years.

Anyway, here is a little vignette I came up with as a wink to those macabre childhood imaginations. 

The bed and teddy bear are 3D prints from files I found on Thingiverse. The bedlinen is tissue, soaked in diluted white glue, while the lone slipper and tentacle were mocked-up from milliput sculpting putty.

As I was pressed for time, I decided to paint this in a fairly straightforward greyscale effect, with only the tentacle being in colour. I would have preferred to experiment with a few more ideas I had, but considering the time constraints I'm fairly content with how it turned out.

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So, with the opening entry out of the way I welcome you all to Challenge 'Ate'! 

I look forward to posting any entries that come in from now until New Years Day. Remember to leave your posts in draft form on the blog and send me a note when you have something ready to go 'live'. 

The gates are open - let's see your work! 

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