Crafting for guys with big thumbs

I'm planning to draw my wee daughter a picture for her 3rd birthday. My idea is to use scraps of wallpaper and/or scrap book paper to form the background of the picture, segmenting the elements of the sketch onto different patterns and colors of paper. I doodled the basic composition (once again during a particularly slow-moving lecture) and have only now to shop for paper. I feel slightly less than macho, but it's for the children!!!

She likes balloons, smiley faces, clouds, and attractively sub-divided farm plots, not to mention polka-spot dresses and pretty shoes. The best part really is that she's so small that even if I have her a plastic grocery bag full of shredded newspaper as a gift she'd be beside herself with happiness because, "Daddy made this for me!"

The Pastime of the Bored

Well, this is my first blog in a long time... I don't suppose making introductory remarks or excuses will help at all, so I will dispense with the niceties.

I drew a picture of a boy with a tag on his coat waiting under a street lamp, reminiscent of the British children fleeing London for the English countryside during the German bombing raids of World War II. It looked a bit melancholy and miserable so I added a happy puppy and a mosquito. Oddly, it still looks melancholy and miserable. You'll note that the sketch also has the charm of blue notebook lines and barely-visible ring tear-offs in the background. Yes, I drew this during class one night. Yes, nothing has changed in the ten years since I was in high school.

Have notebook, will doodle.

I used to keep my notebooks from classes, tearing out the pages and pages of topic outlines and assignments, keeping only the blank pages and the cool scribbles. "Hey, that's a pretty good imaginary band logo," or "Wow, I did an amazing job on the musculoskeletal structure of that be-cloaked and sword-wielding warrior." Once the scanner was invented, these idle-time twiddlings became wonderful fodder for desktop backgrounds, story illustrations, and now, happily- blogs.