Art for Fun

Yesterday afternoon, when John had to be at work, and I got Jet for the latter part of the afternoon, we went to Mrs. Toad's Toys and bought birthday presents for Marina, Jet's cousin. Three from the three of us, a kit for painting and decorating her own heart box, a kit for making friendship bracelets (from Klutz, naturally), and a doll that the toy shop owners said was very trendy for six-year-old girls. Well, better than the other doll set, with teenage dolls in fishnet stockings, bared belly buttons, and high, high heels. I figured that was a little TOO advanced for a six-year-old, though I may be completely wrong.

Jet was still sick. He wanted to watch more videos, but I didn't want to. So we bought a Klutz activity book for him, with crayons, and I bought myself Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered. I have this mental model of myself as being a terrible drawer/artist, even though, now that I think of it, I've been dabbling in watercolors for nearly ten years, I drew the best pig in one of the management classes the instructor had ever seen in ten years of teaching the class, and I'm actually pretty happy with a lot of my landscapes (it's always fun to give a postcard watercolor painting of a vacation place to the people that organized the event). I even bought the watercolor calendar (a block of pieces to practice watercoloring on) just to do thing daily about getting my color mixing sense and blending on a palette better.

Still. My mental model is that I'm a lousy artist. So I bought myself the book, and kind of did a mental blink when I found myself actually drawing stuff that looked "good" to me! Aiee! I also loved that their space for negative criticisms for ALL your drawing in the book is a about a square millimeter.

Didn't hurt, either, to have Jet demand that he sit in my lap and direct me for the activities book, and we colored, cut, tore, folded, and played our way through the first half dozen pages, and he said, quite happily, "That's beautiful!!" when we finished with one coloring page. He even liked the bugs we'd colored, a lot. He is a perfectionist, in the genes, and hates drawing himself as "it's all broken!!" whenever he can't get the colors all in the lines. So he's much happier when I do the coloring for him, but I ask him to do parts of it when he's comfortable, and with time I hope he builds up enough confidence with crayons. He loves painting without any lines at all, and will do that all day, so I hope that will eventually bleed into this.

There were also lots and lots of bad, bad puns in the book, which Jet squinted at, some, and fell over laughing at a surprising number of them. A great introduction to puns. :-)

We ended with the paper airplane, and we played catch for a while, and Jet obviously got much better at it pretty quickly. I was impressed.

So much fun was had by all and no more TV for the evening, a very good thing.

Art for Fun

Yesterday afternoon, when John had to be at work, and I got Jet for the latter part of the afternoon, we went to Mrs. Toad's Toys and bought birthday presents for Marina, Jet's cousin. Three from the three of us, a kit for painting and decorating her own heart box, a kit for making friendship bracelets (from Klutz, naturally), and a doll that the toy shop owners said was very trendy for six-year-old girls. Well, better than the other doll set, with teenage dolls in fishnet stockings, bared belly buttons, and high, high heels. I figured that was a little TOO advanced for a six-year-old, though I may be completely wrong.

Jet was still sick. He wanted to watch more videos, but I didn't want to. So we bought a Klutz activity book for him, with crayons, and I bought myself Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered. I have this mental model of myself as being a terrible drawer/artist, even though, now that I think of it, I've been dabbling in watercolors for nearly ten years, I drew the best pig in one of the management classes the instructor had ever seen in ten years of teaching the class, and I'm actually pretty happy with a lot of my landscapes (it's always fun to give a postcard watercolor painting of a vacation place to the people that organized the event). I even bought the watercolor calendar (a block of pieces to practice watercoloring on) just to do thing daily about getting my color mixing sense and blending on a palette better.

Still. My mental model is that I'm a lousy artist. So I bought myself the book, and kind of did a mental blink when I found myself actually drawing stuff that looked "good" to me! Aiee! I also loved that their space for negative criticisms for ALL your drawing in the book is a about a square millimeter.

Didn't hurt, either, to have Jet demand that he sit in my lap and direct me for the activities book, and we colored, cut, tore, folded, and played our way through the first half dozen pages, and he said, quite happily, "That's beautiful!!" when we finished with one coloring page. He even liked the bugs we'd colored, a lot. He is a perfectionist, in the genes, and hates drawing himself as "it's all broken!!" whenever he can't get the colors all in the lines. So he's much happier when I do the coloring for him, but I ask him to do parts of it when he's comfortable, and with time I hope he builds up enough confidence with crayons. He loves painting without any lines at all, and will do that all day, so I hope that will eventually bleed into this.

There were also lots and lots of bad, bad puns in the book, which Jet squinted at, some, and fell over laughing at a surprising number of them. A great introduction to puns. :-)

We ended with the paper airplane, and we played catch for a while, and Jet obviously got much better at it pretty quickly. I was impressed.

So much fun was had by all and no more TV for the evening, a very good thing.

Coloring...

Reminds me of the time we went to Lucille's and Jet wanted to sit away from us and quietly contemplate a coloring book. I heard him collaring one of the waitresses and persuade her to color something on the page he was looking at.

Later, our waitress came up to us and said, "I can't believe how NEATLY your boy colors!!"

Coloring...

Reminds me of the time we went to Lucille's and Jet wanted to sit away from us and quietly contemplate a coloring book. I heard him collaring one of the waitresses and persuade her to color something on the page he was looking at.

Later, our waitress came up to us and said, "I can't believe how NEATLY your boy colors!!"

Nothing like...

the CO2 froth from really freshly roasted coffee.

This morning, a few folks at work were interested in watching me roast coffee, so I had brought my setup in, and roasted for folks, and I'd been reading about how much froth there can be on really freshly roasted coffee and that it can be a bother in a press pot maker. It was fun to watch it all froth up in the drip filter and to actually be able to drink my coffee black was marvelous. Didn't hurt that I was roasting Jamacian Blue Mountain coffee, reputed to be one of the smoothest in the world (some folks call that 'bland', I like it well enough, though) to a Dark City roast, as I like the caramel overtones at that level of roasting.

I have a Panamanian Best in Cup winner that's aged the requist 48 hours, maybe I'll try that next.

No need to run off and buy myself a way too expensive carton of milk. Yay!

Nothing like...

the CO2 froth from really freshly roasted coffee.

This morning, a few folks at work were interested in watching me roast coffee, so I had brought my setup in, and roasted for folks, and I'd been reading about how much froth there can be on really freshly roasted coffee and that it can be a bother in a press pot maker. It was fun to watch it all froth up in the drip filter and to actually be able to drink my coffee black was marvelous. Didn't hurt that I was roasting Jamacian Blue Mountain coffee, reputed to be one of the smoothest in the world (some folks call that 'bland', I like it well enough, though) to a Dark City roast, as I like the caramel overtones at that level of roasting.

I have a Panamanian Best in Cup winner that's aged the requist 48 hours, maybe I'll try that next.

No need to run off and buy myself a way too expensive carton of milk. Yay!