The squigglebunnies are of utmost importance.

On February 26, 2025, the proto-squigglebunny was born.

It emerged from a study of

Gray

Garland’s visual art style. Well, no, really it emerged from a desire to have an identifiable visual art style, one that was my own but that drew (hehe) from inspirers before and around me. Gray’s one of them! And while I was loath to crib their style directly, I wanted to better understand the actual qualities of linework that turned her acts of spontaneous markmaking into, well, that.

Click the image for a link to the source!

So I made strange shapes on a smaller scale, I tried some different modes of shading that I saw in these florifaunal forms, and somewhere in the mix was born that common ancestor.

Can you see it? That upper protrusion on the left is its nose, with the eye next to it, and the bump below it is like the front legs? Though maybe you could read it as the chin on a human face, I suppose. I read it as the lil leggies on a rabbit. Then there’s the lil flop ear just left of the center, and of course those tufts on the top are plant matter—Shaymin came to mind as I first looked at it. Sort of a Shaymin/Musharna dealio.

And it reminded me of the pareidollies.

Since at least 3rd grade, I’ve been doodling these little guys by spontaneously making random marks in a usually-vertical cluster, reading into them faces and arms and robes and hats as I do. The name pareidolly is new (as a play on pareidolia, the phenomenon that they exploit), but I’ve been making them on and off for over a decade now. Here’s a recent one:

Do you see it? The little mouse face with the big eye, the angular hat, the long dress with bunches of fabric, the arm with its little dot-hand reaching up as if she’s contemplating something.

How about another:

I think when I first drew this I was seeing the face as that little triangle up top, a sort of bug face with a tiny antenna—mice and bugs are disproportionately represented among pareidollies—but now I see a different figure emerge. A short-statured monk with a tall cylindrical hat, another mantis-y face and perhaps a cane or pointing stick in hand. I’ll let you find it.

How about this guy from another drawing session:

God doesn’t he look so sneaky and dastardly. Like he’s about to swipe something from you with those little stick arms. I wrote “heehee” next to him so you’d know.

Usually they’re in long skirts, as Edwardian dresses or draped sarees or vague trenchcoats or the like, but I’ve experimented since then. Here’s a dog mech with fairy wings and legs (you can tell I circled this one cause I really liked it):

And here’s a dancer with some sort of beautiful dynamic abstract spindle-leg situation:

I could keep going.

The point is, on this particular night, this long-established style/practice/doodle game of mine merged with these new linestyle insights… and some interesting new lifeforms began to emerge.

That last little guy—not the lovely cameo face but the one with the stout body and the plant-tufts and the squimbly lil face (look, do you have a better word for it? Tell me in the comments if you have a better word for it)—had me hooked. I had to be able to replicate that vibe, that essence.

But he was spontaneous. A lightning strike of adorableness and mystery. So what emerged from my many, many attempts to capture the same lightning twice was something else. A longer, more consistent but still ever-mutable thread of life. A new species of pareidolic art guy that had come into its own, abandoned the esotericism and adopted a new charm. A people with their own character and lore and culture, with rules for their creation that could be followed and/or broken. Oryctolagus scriptus: The squigglebunnies.

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Squigglebunnies are squigglebunnies, regardless of how mouse- or sheep- or bird-like they may seem. They come in many shapes and sizes, but have a few identifiable key characteristics about them.

There’s the snoot, where the eyes, nose, and mouth (rarely seen but visible on some squigglebunnies from the right angle) are. Then the tufts—that big mass of woolen/furry/feathery/floral matter on the rest of the head. Young squigglebunnies lack distinctive ear tufts, which develop in early adulthood. The arms are blobby and the legs sticklike. The bodies are amorphous and wooly, and squigglebunnies often wear long flowy dresses and cloaks over them.

They’re fairly shy around humans, and are very rarely seen facing one straight on. They love adventure, though. They love to roam and gaze up at the stars and make big grand gestures from underneath their cloaks. Some of them have a sort of severity in their look, like they’re a very tiny creature who’s nonetheless on a grand and important quest. They can be rather determined, and yet also very spacey and soft. None of them know what taxes are. There’s something oddly Jupiterian about them: the exploratory drive of Sagittarius and the dreamy perceptiveness of Pisces.

For myself, the artist, there are some other important qualities. Squigglebunnies are, crucially, spontaneously formed. Every head-cloud and cloak shape happens as I put pen to paper. My initial intentions set the stage for the actual drawing but they can and will get subverted by the automatic movements of my hand, and the exact pose and quality of any one squigglebunny can never be strictly replicated. They are, however, stil predictable, much more so than the chaotic and ephemeral pareidollies; some pareidolly attempts produce nothing I can read into, but I know I can follow a series of short steps and very reliably get a cute lil squigglebunny out of it. There’s safety and consistency in that wildness that my autistic mind (among other aspects of me) is drawn to.

They’re also subject to interpretation and shaping in the process of being made. When I draw the little head cloud, I often see multiple places that could become the snoot with the placement of that single dot (and maybe a second just outside the head for an extra woobly look). Each suggests to me a different creature, a different path to take, and in choosing one my mind gets to collaborate with the instinctual markmaking. There’s a dance between the controllable and uncontrollable happening here, not a flat surrender of either one to the other.

This sort of happens with pareidollies too, and it’s something I reflected on recently; often as I draw I begin to see where in my automatic mess the face is going to go, and that awareness shapes how my hand moves around that area. With squigglebunnies, there’s just a bit more time, more space, to breathe and contemplate and intentionally probe. I’m not sure it represents a better collaboration between subconscious content and conscious awareness (oh dear we’re veering dangerously close to another essay concept I plan to write soon) than the sort that happens with pareidollies, but it’s different in quality, I like it, and that the collaboration happens anyway is the important bit.

And they make me so happy. Like, seriously, making these little guys has brought me an extremely palpable creative joy. It’s so unserious on the face of it and yet it has so much weight. In those first several days I felt a deep sort of responsibility to the squigglebunnies. They were still being born, still coming into their own, and I had the duty to make it happen, to be the channel through which this idea could come to exist. It made my spine light up and my heart buzz with generative joy in a way I last felt when drawing my OCs in the style of my sixth grade self, in a way that life hasn’t been making much room for lately, in a way that puts me in mind of mosses and wildflowers growing out from concrete. And they’re, I mean, they’re so little!! So baby!!

So now that squigglebunnies exist, we’re in the expansion phase. Briefly I got this flutter of anxiety that I was on the precipice of getting bored with my new fellows, that their look had homogenized, that they would cease to capture my attention and spark my whimsy, but it hit me quick: I’ve only learned the basics of squigglebunnies. Now I need to draw them in action.

I’d already had so much fun exploring previous tiny possibilities—what if I give them two eyes, what do they look like from the front, what if I give one a hat—and now new ones were emerging.

It began simply. One small step for man, one giant leap for squigglebunny. Some 4-7 million years ago, humans learned how to stand. Today, squigglebunnies learned how to sit.

A historic event, truly.

So now they can do anything. Here’s a squigglebunny trying to get a bug (squigglebug?) onto its hand:

Here’s a tiny squigglebunny classroom:

Here are some squiggletwins hiding behind a wall:

Here’s a tarot squiggleStrength:

And here’s, just, this guy, who isn’t doing anything but whom I love no less for it:

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I have always wanted to draw people—not just from photos, but from imagination, in poses, doing things, being alive on the page. And I have always felt blocked in my drawing by an inability to do that. But now there are squigglebunnies! And squigglebunnies can do anything.

I’m reminded of this Silvia Hartmann interview passage:

When I got my head around the fact that not only not I, but no-one at all can paint an elephant, I was left with the question, “Well if I can’t paint an elephant, what can I paint?”

I can paint a symbol of an elephant, and you can make that symbol as elaborate as you want, so it can look pretty “life like” and people might say, “Oh that’s a great elephant, you did really well, it looks exactly like a photograph of one!”

You can do that, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Or you can just put a big grey blob in the middle of a piece of paper, or you could take reds, and greens, and purples, and blacks and silvers and just try and express what an elephant feels like to you.

Then you’ve got this picture full of colours and of weirdness, and it is called, “The Elephant”, and that’s what a lot of people don’t understand about abstract art is that the artist tried the best they could to express that thing, that inexpressible thing that an elephant really is.

And this is the only thing that has ever mattered to me personally about drawing. In singing and music composition, craft and technique feel like beautiful tools to assist in the core task of conveying emotional essence. I care about them with a sort of lightness, even as I care deeply. In drawing, they’ve always felt like hurdles between me and that core task.

Perhaps some drawers and painters feel the same way I do about technique as a musician, but my own history with the medium has instilled in me different attitudes. And as I write, I’m starting to suspect that that could change. That I could—if I wanted to, which maybe one day I will—develop a personal interest in things like studying anatomy and perspective now that I can, just, draw badly and still communicate heart, still have fun.

I’ve felt for a while now that a huge part of my musical skill owes its existence to my always conceiving of myself as fantastic at the skill level I’m at. In fifth grade, as I was making tracks left and right in mobile GarageBand, I wasn’t concerned with the fact that I didn’t know what a compressor was. I was very, very bad at mixing, but I wasn’t mixing; I was making silly beats, and I was amazing at it. And so I did it long enough, with consistent enough enjoyment, that now I’m pretty good at mixing, and I enjoy being good at it.

So maybe squigglebunnies are my way into drawing. Maybe not. But I know that, for me, drawing—not just abstract markmaking but putting beings onto paper with actions and emotions and places and relationships and stories—does absolute wonders for my mood and my energy levels and my overall creative flow. And that I will be so immensely content to just get really good at the craft of squigglebunny drawing. I have no clue how high the ceiling is, only that I’m excited to find out, and I’m also excited to keep playing around here on the ground floor.

So these are the squigglebunnies! It’s been three days and squigglebunnies are my thing now. I’m not backing down. They are dependable, they are unpredictable, they are imperfect, they are limitless, they are teaching me things about artistry, they are a source of fuel for my heart and soul, they are so happy that they exist and so am I. They are incredibly important and they are teaching me how a thing can be important without being scary. You should find a thing that does that for you too. Maybe start by trying to draw a squigglebunny. Maybe start by failing! I think you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised by what happens.