Puddle Duck and Puzzle Duck

Puddle Duck and Puzzle Duck went out for a walk.
Said Puzzle Duck to Puddle Duck, “We should have a talk.
Because you enjoy it so, we go out in the rain,
But then I do not get a chance to exercise my brain.”

“But Puzzle Duck,” said Puddle Duck, “I do not know why
You'd want to be inside the house, fun's falling from the sky!
Surely I would like a game that we could play together,
But I can only splish and splash out in the rainy weather.”

Said Puzzle Duck to Puddle Duck “It is a mystery
Why some things that are fun for you just are not fun for me.”
“I do not know the answer,” said Puddle Duck, for sure.
“Why don't you think it over while I splash about some more?”

---

This post is a confluence of a lot of things I've been interested in lately: trying to practice and improve my drawing skills, poetry, and the philosophy of games. I saw @opheliafu's posting for Doodle Doodledayeo Round 14 this morning and immediately knew what I wanted to do for it. The inspiration words are Rain / Duck / Umbrella. I live in the Pacific Northwest of the US, a region that it strongly associated with rain. More specifically, I live in Eugene, Oregon, and ducks are kind of big thing here – the University of Oregon's sports teams are The Ducks, for example. I like to take long walks every morning for exercise, and on both my normal medium-length route and one of my alternate long routes I pass some duck-themed public art (I took a hybrid route today so I could snap pics of both):

Taking those long walks gives me a lot of time to think. One of the topics I like to think about is the philosophy of games and fun, like what makes something a game, or whether games can be objectively fun or if it's a purely subjective phenomenon and some games are fun for some people but not others. Some people think that fun is a “preference satisfaction” process – there are things you like, and when you get them that's fun. I'm mostly convinced that's wrong, I think fun is more about the process of engaging with systems in a particular way, but I can't dismiss that perspective completely. Another thing that occurred to me on one of those walks was that “puzzle” and “puddle” are very similar words, and I came up with the idea of two characters who could exist on different ends of a spectrum: Puddle Duck is a joyously exuberant duck that loves running around in the rain, while Puzzle Duck is analytical and likes puzzles and strategy games. I even started composing a sing-song-y poem about them, something reminiscent of poetry aimed at children (these are long walks). Seeing the Rain / Duck / Umbrella prompt inspired me try recall the lines I had come up with before, finish the poem, and illustrate it.

I started with Puddle Duck:

Then I added Puzzle Duck. I had a tough time getting an expression that looked like I wanted it to, my initial attempts kept turning out angry so I had to erase them and try again.

Then I added some raindrops:

Normally I stick with straight pencil images when I'm drawing, I scan them in and clean up the scanning artifacts using a combination of GIMP and Inkscape. If I had done that my final image would have been like this:

But I wanted to try doing color for this one, so I experimented with a new process. I went a bit more extreme with the color correction in GIMP and cleaned up stray marks, scanning artifacts, and eraser stuff:

Then I used Inskscape to do a bitmap trace to get the lines, which I switched to completely black, hoping this would work like an automatic inking step. Then I traced out the areas for the different colors. And I added the text of the poem on the left.

Overall I'm mostly satisfied with the final result (although I wasn't happy with my coloring process, I'll need to either refine it or try something different the next time I try to work with color). Even though I think the philosophy of games is an interesting and non-frivolous topic, I think it is useful to be able to approach the topic in a playful manner, which I think I'm doing in the poem and the illustration. Plus I find it amusing that this post is a nexus of multiple different topics I've been thinking and posting about.