The Fresh Prince of Corpses

I've been playing the "game" of Corpsing at the website anexquisitecorpse.net
for 6 months now. Again, my definition of a game is quite different from a die-hard's definition. To me it's simply "a list of rules that a group of people follow for, primarily, enjoyment."

And the rules of Exquisite Corpsing are fairly straightforward. You draw a peice of artwork that is 200 pixels high and 450 pixels wide. However, you are given the bottom 15 pixels of someone else's work which you must try and continue, taking whatever visual cues that you can.

(You can see all the "published" corpses I have been involved in off under the "CORPSES" sidebar to the right.)

As with any group of people, certain lingo develops over time that just becomes a defacto standard within that group. I don't think it's a weird sense of insider elitism; it's just a natural instinct to develop cutesy names for things that would otherwise require longer explanations. "Meeples" being a fine example in Euro Board Games, "Wizard Mode" being another in Pinball.

Of course, explaining the history and definition on a new member into that group of a strange word that all the members relate to is another issue. But they usually get it.

And so, as I started reading comments about various Corpses being posted, often I saw the term "FP" or "Fresh Prince" being tossed around on particular "slices" of Corpses. Quickly, I learned that when you don't even try to follow the visual cues (or at least APPEAR to try to follow them), this is known as being a"Fresh Prince." Which, as you would expect being such an disparate term for such an action, has an amusing origin. I guess it came from this corpse.

Of course, there a varying degrees of Freshness. The obvious example being at the link above, but somewhere there is a line that gets crossed as illustrated here in this Corpse off to the side.

I mean, c'mon, I spend all this time carefully mixing in the edges for the large face, making an invisible seam with what I think should be a forehead. And then, as a bone, I toss some really nice and graphic red curves for the next artist to take a lead from. And while I can forgive someone just trying to blur out the face on the left, blurring out the red lines just because it doesn't fit into his Tesla artwork just reeks of Freshiness! At least blend those red lines into sparks or something. Or at least just end the lines! GAH!