There Be Pirates

The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a pirate.
- Bern Williams -

I’ve been drawing again. The Draw Something app on my iPad is letting me express my creative talents. Okay, I realize I am rather talentless, but I’m having a good time drawing.

Can you guess what I was drawing? The category was ‘There Be Pirates’. Does that help? The word was 5 letters long.

There are many very talented cartoonists on the internet – here are a few that I have discovered:

• Mark Armstrong

• Doodlemum

• Mike Smith

Aren’t these people good? They can draw clothes!

Since my last post about Drawing (A Drawing Game) I’ve earned enough ‘coins’ to buy colours – including green, which the Draw Something app doesn’t include when you first start playing.

Now I can draw grass. A green squiggly line is grass. A similar squiggly line, only in blue, is water. You can see from my drawing above that I’ve drawn water – and not just plain water, but waves. Can you see the shark in the water? I hope not because I didn’t draw one. I think it would be very hard to draw a stick shark…

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
John W. Gardner -

A Drawing Game

Third Daughter and The Car Guy have been playing Draw Free on their iPads. They invited me to join, so I downloaded the App a few days ago. The premise is simple enough. Player 1 chooses one of 3 supplied words -  which they then illustrate. They send the resulting drawing to Player 2 who tries to guess what the word is. Player 2 is told how many letters are in the word, and they are given a selection of letters to choose from.

It is an odd game for us to play. None of us seem to have the artistic gene. Then, there is the issue I have with the colour palette. They only give you four colours: black, red, blue and yellow.  They don’t give you green. How can anyone draw without green?

Correct answers earn you some points and once you have enough points, I think you can trade them for more colours. Or maybe not. I’m not too clear about that part. But it doesn’t matter, because when three people who can’t draw very well play a game like this, it will be an awfully long time before we earn very many points.

Here is one of my very best drawings. Can you guess what word I was illustrating? It is 8 letters long and it has a ‘k’ in it.

Here is another one of my iPad posts: What My iPad2 has Taught Me – as you can see, I haven’t progressed beyond stick men and I can’t draw clothing yet.

Looking but not Seeing

Life is like a jigsaw puzzle but you don’t have the picture on the front of the box to know what it’s supposed to look like. Sometimes, you’re not even sure if you have all of the pieces.
- A Whack on the Side of the Head -

I finished a jigsaw puzzle while I was at the cabin last week. It was a difficult one, partly because the picture on the box was very small. Then there was all that sky, water, rocks and grass!

750 pieces and I was examining each one closely, looking for a certain shape or ever so slight colour variations. I was looking at the little picture, but wasn’t seeing the big one.

Even when the puzzle was done, I saw sky, water, rocks and grass – and a rider on a horse and some teepees – oh, and a rainbow.

Then I looked at it through the lens of the camera. Goodness, this is a picture of a wolf head! A very big wolf head. I sure didn’t see that coming.

The thing is, I should have known there would be a picture in a picture. The puzzle is from a piece of art by Bev Doolittle, and she is well known for the ways she uses context, design and pattern to hide images.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.
- Bill Cosby -

I’m not the only one who sometimes misses the obvious, right? RIGHT?

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Then there was the time I Was a Little Mixed Up.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Crayons Merge

Last fall each of my grown children purchased new crayons and artist’s canvas, and it wasn’t for the grand-children to take to school. No, they used a glue gun, a candle and a hair dryer to create a merger of the crayons and the canvas.

The result was my Christmas Present last year.  I’m hoping they will do the same this year. I loved the results! One daughter, the one who lives to cook, presented me with this beautiful bundle of vegetables. I can only imagine how long it took to melt the crayons with a candle, then plant each melted bit onto the canvas!

Another daughter glued black, grey, white, green and yellow crayons onto the top of a canvas, then used a hair dryer to melt the pointed ends so they dripped. Note the new colours that formed near the bottom where one colour ran into another.

The third daughter – whose husband rides the same model of Harley that The Car Guy did (see A Perfect Storm) – chose a Harley Davidson theme and colours. She combined the melted dot technique to outline the Harley logo, then she used the drip method on the ends of the crayons.

The only consultation between the three girls was the size of the canvas they were going to use. It was so wonderful to see how different each piece turned out!

There are lots of websites that explain the process for these projects. Here are a few:

Crayon Wishes and Popsicle Dreams

Wingledings

Pink and Green Mama

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I have been know to do a few crafty things too.  Here is Sondra the Snow Goddess  in a post I called A 3 Dressed Up As a 9.