Inspired by vintage doodle books, our challenge gives you a fragment of a drawing to complete any way you’d like. Alison Bechdel, the noted cartoonist and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. the genius grant), provided this doodle as a starting point; the rest is up to you.
UPDATE 11/22: Carolita Johnson is the winner of our challenge!
See the winning submission and the runners up. Thanks to everyone who shared their work with us!
→ Return to the challenge page
Mary
Huntington Station,NY
After tossing out a few ideas, I turned the image to the horizontal, and soon saw the unfurling cloth. That part came easily...but then I felt the need of something emerging, and drew a blank. So I did what any serious artist would do, I asked my boyfriend. "Butterflies", he said, "or bats".
I think I could get away with the caption: "No mothballs last fall"
- Mary Nagin
Carolita Johnson
New York City
The doodle girl's position immediately brought back the memory of the day, on an island in Spain, that my dog, who hated getting wet, was rolling herself dry every time we walked on grass as we climbed up a cliff from the beach (I had thrown her into the water to cool her off). At one point I said, "Stop that, you're going to roll off the cliff." She just looked at me defiantly and continued rolling. She was only a year or so old. Exasperated, I kept walking, and when we got to the very top of the cliff, I turned to see where she was, but all I saw was the tips of her little feet as they went over the edge. I stood paralyzed, listening for a thud or a crash or a cry, but heard nothing. So I got down on my hands and knees, and crawled to the edge of the cliff and peered over the edge, thoroughly expecting to see nothing but tragedy and heartbreak, but there, sitting on a tiny tuft of grass set into the side of the cliff, like something out of a Tex Avery cartoon, was my dog, Carmen. She let out a long whine of distress as she looked up at me. I gasped, then commanded (trying to look like I had everything under control so she wouldn't panic), "SIT!" while I tried to think what to do. There was no way to get to her, and we were far from everything. I told her, "I love you but you're a dog, and you're going to have to take your chances and jump, and I'll wish you luck, and if you don't make it, promise to come back to me in another dog." (We had a very special relationship. Two very independent beings.) Luckily, I had trained her to jump and land in all sorts of situations and heights. So, I took a deep breath and said, "Okay. One, two, three.... JUMP!" and she did. She jumped off the tuft, and began rolling and bouncing off the side of the cliff (it was awful to see), as I screamed to her, "GOOD LUCK! GOOD LUCK! GOOD LUCK! GOOD LUCK!" again and again as if her life depended on it, till she landed on a second, lower cliff and rolled almost to the edge, then stopped. One more roll, and she'd have kept going and plummeted into the rocks and waves below. She just got up and shook herself off.
I screamed, "SIT!!!"
Then I went down to that cliff, which was accessible, and picked her up, and carried her home, simultaneously in tears and laughing. She never questioned my authority again, I might add.
She was a wonderful little dog, through thick and thin.
Riva
Bronx, NY
Who knows where these ideas come from! It's what I saw and heard the more I stared at it. Sure is fun.
Adam
Los Angeles
Yep, first focused on the negative space in the original hand and saw a new grip, clinging to a rocky cliff pulled from the female figure's lines.
Then, seemed like it needed a dastardly villain.
Pat
Canton, NY
After trying desperately to doodle something digitally, I conceded that I was out of depth and instead slapped this together with colored pencil. I wanted to create something whimsical and capricious, which is often hard to do after creative block.
Michael
Brooklyn
Hanging on to the razor edge of life to avoid crushing oblivion.
Cheers Alison and Kurt!
steph
washington. dc
identified the features of the drawing that stood out: something imbalanced, expressive face and made a creature that reflected those features
rachel
queens
This was a wonderful challenge. I've always dreamed what it would be like to fly!
Adrienne
Takoma Park, MD
I used a sharpie and some cutting and pasting to try and keep the comic feel. It's the moment when you realize there is no way to keep your balance and it is all coming down!
Lola
Spain/Mexico but I live in NYC
A young 18 year named Avi is on a quest in Costa Rica to find a very ancient box supposedly containing a precious diamond. Once she finds the box she finds a 50ft hotdog instead of a 50 carat diamond.
Nina
Brooklyn, NY
trying to grasp a grounding thread as a dream flows into the realm of nightmares
Nina
Brooklyn, NY
that moment in the creative process when fear and apprehension morph into intrepid curiosity.
Jo
Manhattan, KS
I am calling this a doogletangle since I zentangled the letters P, H, and D.
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