Hasta La Ideas

New from Redstone Press comes this lovingly produced Inkblot Test complete with 12 cards. As a sceptical sort, I was eager to see if the blots could get the measure of me…

In addition to the series of colourful freeform blots and the accompanying booklet of interpretations, there’s also great essay on the history of the blobby medium by writer and journalist Will Hobson.

Far from ramming home the validity of Hermann Rorschach’s psychological tests, Hobson acknowledges the ridicule that the visual experiments have often brought since first used in the 1940s and 50s, and how it is now perhaps in art rather than in science that the inkblots live on as “catnip to the imagination”.

The opening paragraph to the Short History of Inkblots essay, for example, begins with this funny Andy Warhol story.

“When Andy Warhol showed his series of Rorschach paintings in 1984, he claimed he’d been confused about what the Rorschach test involved while he was making them. He thought the person taking the test – him in this case – had to create his or her own inkblots, which a psychologist would then analyse. If he had known better, he said, he would have just copied Rorschach’s ten standard inkblots.”

The basic Redstone Inkblot Test is simple: just look through the series of 12 inkblots and select the three that you’re most drawn to. From this group, choose your favourite, turn it over and see if what you saw in the image is in the list provided.

This will, apparently, feed into the overall personality profile of the particular inkblot. The handbook then provides more detail on the profile and what it says about you.

Suffice to say that on picking my favourite blot and duly flipping it over for the definition, I’m informed that there appears to be some kind of “ascerbic struggle going on under the surface”. So watch out.

More details on the Redstone Press Inkblot Test at redstonepress.co.uk. It’s available from the Redstone Shop from tomorrow (£11.95).