Skating Mice: Our First Picture

This picture took the longest of all of our images to make. Learning how to use the software was probably the part that took us so long. Lilly and I come up with short stories like this with these mice and try to give off playful messages. We hope you enjoy.

Skating Mice. This drawing attempts to tell a story in a single image. The main story is about the past, the present and the future. But there are other stories here such as the setting of the story and questions such as, "Where do mice get skates?" and, "Why red mittens?" I think that each person has their own answers.

The idea for this picture came from a series of discussions with Julian Williams, author of Drawing and Illusion. The discussions centered on storytelling and time in a drawing as to whether a drawing represented a single moment, or a series of moments. A story requires progression, which is a sequence of things or events such that we are able to understand (or able to believe that we understand) three aspects of the story. The progression need not be a progression in time. It could be a progression in ideas or relationships.

If the story's progression is in time, then the three important aspects of the story are the past, the present and the future. The past represents the origins, causes and means that lead up to the beginning of the story: the present is not a single moment but an interval of time stretching from the beginning of the story to the end. The future is the third important aspect of the story: this aspect goes toward understanding why the story is important. It tells us what the story means: who benefited, what was the upshot, what will happened next, has the outlook been improved, what has been lost or gained. Only the second aspect is explicitly part of the story itself. The first and third aspects give the story context. They could be as simple as, "Once upon a time..." at the beginning and "They lived happily ever after," at the end.

If the story's progression is in ideas or relationships, the three aspects are 1) the causes, 2) a narrative description of the story elements and how the elements act together to achieve the outcome, and 3) the significance of the story as to how it fits into a larger universe of ideas or relationships.

Of course, a drawing can tell more than one story at a time. That is something that makes many good drawings so enjoyable.

Please see more of our drawings.