Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Pirates!


Brady and I went to McDonald's today. Health food, don't you know. We took our sketchbooks, to do some life drawing. If you don't have a child, you may not know that the latest Happy Meal toyline is for "Pirates of the Caribbean 2". They have a couple of cartoony plush figures of the main characters. Brady likes the Jack Sparrow one the best (cause the others are skulls and dark stuff). So, she decided to draw this scene with him in it, instead of actual people in the restaurant. I thought it turned out pretty cool:

Monday, July 17, 2006

Fun with Numbers



Brady did this sketch today, and I thought I'd share. She tells me it's of a line of people waiting at a movie theater concession stand. There's a lot going on here, and it takes a minute to look at, to appreciate it all. What impressed me was that there were people of varying heights, varying races, and varying clothing and hairstyles. Plus, there's some really good hands here. Not to mention that there's background! There's a checkered floor, a counter with a cash register on it, a movie marquee with times on it above their heads, and way in the back (perspective!), there's an arcade with a driving game in it. Good grief! I don't do backgrounds NOW half of the time. And she's not even EIGHT yet!
Keep reading, though, because this gets weirder.

David Cowles, a friend and huge inspiration of mine(www.davidcowles.net), was in town with his daughter a few weeks ago to see Disney. We had dinner with them one night, and Brady bonded with them over a game of "number fun", drawing on the "To Go" bag as we waited for our check. What you do is someone draws a number, and gives it to the next person, who has to figure out how to make it into a drawing. I was surprised that Brady was holding her own with them. At the end of the meal, David promised Brady to send her some "Numbers Homework" in the mail. True to his word, a few days later, a small sketchbook arrived in the mail, each page with a different number on it. Some were easy, but some were pretty hard...like the number "seventeen"...SPELLED out. I was impressed again with Brady's creativity, and she did about half of the book in one sitting (she'll finish it soon, David, and we'll send you some of the drawings!). SO....I decided to give her a project of my own. We have a "Summer Fun Sketchbook" that we're keeping this year, and I gave her some "Number Fun" pages to do in it. This drawing of the crowd at a movie concession? It started out as the number "Fourteen". See here for yourself:

Here it is again, superimposed over the final image:
I was impressed with the drawing itself, for the reasons I pointed out, but now I was speechless. I have no idea how she came up with all of this. Wow