Watching You Watching Me

The other day I was walking to the grocery store around the corner from my apartment, and I noticed that one of the trees was watching me. I've walked past this tree probably two hundred times, and somehow I never noticed that it had all these creepy eyes all over it. It's a pretty fantastic tree:




It even has a creepy face.

Anyway, the tree inspired me, so I decided to draw it, with lots of outlines so I could really put my new Cintiq tablet to the test. The large, expensive Cintiqs are gorgeous (like an Apple Cinema Display that you can draw on), but the advantage of the smaller one is that you can put it in your lap and relax and draw on it like a sketchbook, turning it and tilting it as desired. So I drew a lot of lines, here and there over the past few days, and I ended up with this:

(click to enlarge)


By the time I was done with all those lines I didn't particularly feel like coloring the thing in, and I kind of liked it black and white anyway. But it does sort of feel like a page from a coloring book, so I thought maybe someone else might want to color it in. If you happen to feel like coloring, here is a large version you can play with - and do please email me the results, or post them in the comments.

When I was a little kid the local grocery store used to have occasional coloring contests on their brown paper grocery bags. A picture of a turkey at Thanksgiving, or pumpkins at Halloween, that sort of thing. It always annoyed me because with brown as a base color, none of my brilliant Crayolas came out the way they were intended. But I did it anyway, and one time I won five dollars, and it was immensely exciting. This will sort of be like that, except you'll have a nice white base color, and no one is going to win five dollars.

P.S. In case you don't know, a nice way to color a flat image like this is to set it as a multiply layer in Photoshop and then do the color on a layer underneath it.