Design a tattoo for yourself. Be realistic in your design (i.e. respect the constraints on color and detail). Include in your submission any information you wish to volunteer on placement and its significance.
And really do design it for yourself. You should be seriously willing to consider getting the tattoo.
Participants
Create a greeting card for any occasion. Make a birthday card, a wedding invitation, a holiday card, or something completely new … anything. Mother’s Day is coming up in May, so that might be a timely project, but it’s completely up to you. Create the artwork for the front and the text for the inside.
The challenge is to create an ambigram.
An ambigram is a word or phrase that is written so that it can be read in more than one way. (Or, as Douglas Hofstadter put it, “a calligraphic design that manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves”.) There are many different kinds of ambigrams. The most common type of ambigram is a word or name written so that it appears the same when turned upside-down (or in technical terms, with 180-degree rotational symmetry). But there’s also ambigrams where the second reading is a mirror image, or the spaces between the letters of the first reading, or many other possibilities. Nor does the second reading need to be the same as the first; it can also be a related word (or name), or an opposite.
The two widely acknowledged masters of ambigrams are Scott Kim and John Langdon. They both have websites where you can view many examples of their creations. There are also several archives of other people’s ambigrams to be found on the web.
Feel free to create more than one if you get inspired. Or, create several and pick the most legible one for your submission.
Illuminate a page. The text can be anything you want. You can do something traditional (i.e. a passage from a religious book), or maybe one of your favorite quotes, or something that you wrote yourself.
For more information on illuminated manuscripts, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumination_%28manuscript%29 or http://www.leavesofgold.org/. Gold leaf is not required.
Imagine that you are a beloved, popular, syndicated cartoonist, with your strip appearing in thousands of newspapers worldwide. Draw some unpublishable (or very nearly unpublishable), contract-breaking strips. You can either make your own original characters, or channel some other cartoonist: your choice, but you have to actually draw the strips yourself. Simply whiting out the word balloons on some Cathy cartoons and then filling in your own text will not fulfill the requirements of this challenge.
You can draw two or more daily strips (three or four panels in black and white), or a single Sunday strip (in color, typically eight panels plus the throwaway-gag row, though you could imagine yourself to be as popular as Bill Watterson and able to demand free-format Sundays).
Write a Random Rubaiyat. That is, go to Wikipedia, click on the link titled “Random article”, and write an interlocking rubaiyat on the subject of the article that comes up. No, you may not click on the link a second time if you don’t like the one that comes up. Seriously. If you happen to get a Disambiguation Page, then you should use the first link as your subject. But otherwise, you must accept what first comes up.
Submit a caption for each drawing in the New Yorker Caption Contest throughout the month of November. This will involve writing maybe one sentence (or sentence fragment) per week, so make it good. Each should be brilliant and original; shoot to make yours the winning entry, or at least one the top three chosen out of the thousands upon thousands of submissions each week. New cartoons are posted each Monday. You have until the following Sunday to submit a caption.
Create an illustration to a scary story. As usual, you can use ink, oils, photography, pencil, crayon, Photoshop, needlepoint, ASCII-graphics … whatever medium works best for you. A realistic style is not required, but try to avoid the purely abstract. The idea is for the illustration to be recognizable, at least to someone familiar with the story.
You can use any story you like as the source for your illustration. Include with your illustration a pointer to the story, and the specific scene you’ve chosen to illustrate. For well-known, freely available stories (e.g. something from Poe or Lovecraft) you can simply supply a sentence from the story as a caption, as was commonly done in full-page illustrations in 19th-century books. For stories less widely familiar, please include a short excerpt from the story that your illustration should accompany, so that we may appreciate your artwork in context.
Write a set of three double dactyls. (Consult Wikipedia for a concise explanation of the constraints of the double dactyl.) You can pick anyone and anything for your subjects. However, what you do not get to choose are the nonsense lines, and the single-word lines. Instead, you must use the ones given in these lists:
Flibberty gibberty Inferiority Thurible durable Investigational Insulin globulin Characteristically
Use each one only once, so that you use all the selections in course of your trilogy. (Of course, it is still up to you to decide which nonsense lines goes with which word, and in which line in the second stanza your word should be placed.)
Create your own Onion-style article (see http://www.onion.com if for some reason you don’t know what this means), complete with an accompanying photo, illustration, or chart of some sort. You can make it set in the past, present or future. You can make it timely or apropos of nothing. You can use a photo you take yourself, or some sort of photoshopped collage. Fill it with inside jokes if you like. But try to make it really funny.
Pick a painting, drawing, photo, poem, story, novel, song, film/video, or anything else that is in the public domain. If it is a poem, story, novel, or song, create one or more illustrations (or photo, or video) for it. If it is an image or film/video, write a poem, short story or song for which that image will be the illustration.
For this month, create one or more pages from an alphabet book. There are many different kinds of alphabet books, and you are encouraged to look inside a few on amazon.com or a local bookstore for ideas. The most traditional type is to illustrate each letter with a single object, such as an animal, flower, or food. Other alphabet books tell a story, along the lines of the traditional “A was an apple pie”. Still others are meant to be read by adults instead of children. Your page (or pages) can contain images, text, poetry, or all of the above, or maybe something else entirely.