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Posts tagged ‘autumn’

Sep 18

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C is for … taking advantage of creative opportunity

If you follow our Monday Post comments, you know that I’ve been out of my daily writing groove. I’ve even had the itch to do some drawing, but recently have been making the choice to focus on editorial client work. The work is coming out my ears and as my husband lost his job last week, it’s hard for me to not fill every waking moment with billable hours. (Totally unsustainable and ill-advised, natch.)

But then Liam, my kindergartener, came home with an assignment — an assignment for me. His teacher is assembling an ABC book created by class parents. She needed a few parents to take an extra letter, so what the hell, I took two. First I signed up for N, because I immediately thought of “nest.” I love making nests, whether two- or three-dimensional. Then I went ahead and signed up for A, telling myself that I’d have to come up with something slightly less obvious than “apple.” I should also confess that I LOVE Liam’s teacher, and wanted to impress her didn’t want to embarrass myself with a sub-par effort.

N is for nestSo last night after dinner, I left my laptop in my office and got started. Liam supervised. I told myself not to get too carried away: “Don’t even think about looking at typography,” I told myself. “Just freehand it.” After thinking through my basic approach, I improvised.

Of course, I ended up completely immersed. It’s just so darned fun to play with colored pencils and paper for a couple of hours. Does it matter that my lettering looks totally amateur? Or that the colors on the A sheet don’t work that well? No. Doesn’t matter at all. I had a great time and Liam was pleased.

A is for autumnIn “N is for nest,” I really wanted the baby birds to look cute. Please tell me I succeeded! If I’d let myself have more time, I would have tucked the nest into a the crook of a tree branch, but it is what it is.

The photograph of “A is for autumn” didn’t come out that well (the colors are actually more red than pink), but you get the idea.

The moral of this story is: When a creative bone comes your way, grab it and run. Then get back to work.

Oct 29

3 Comments

Brittany: Fall in New York

This is my favorite time of year. I love it when the leaves change color and the opressive heat (and sun) of the summer gives way to cooler temperatures. I feel energized in the cool (but not cold) weather, and my writing output attests to the fact that I am a seasonal writer — doing my best writing in the fall.

Fall is also a great time to be a mom, since I’m finding so many fun things to do with the boys right now. We’ve done the apple orchards and pumpkin patches — with the farm rides and corn mazes, fresh apple cider, and apple cider doughnuts. And this past week, Kira and I got pumpkins and had the boys paint them.

 

 

You can see one of the painted pumpkins beside John’s foot in this picture. The boys had a lot of fun with it, but honestly, so did I. I love that the boys are finally both old enough to do all of the activities I dreamed of doing before I became a mom. Easter egg hunts, painting/carving pumpkins at Halloween, making gingerbread men at Christmas, all of it is finally possible, for the most part.

I say for the most part because of the mixed success we had with another Halloween project I cooked up. I had some tomato stakes that were just lying around, and it occurred to me that they were the shape of ghosts. A (very ill-defined) plan for making some ghosts with the boys started forming in my head. I was going to buy some cotton or cheesecloth at the craft store, but then I found a huge roll of polyester quilt batting that I wasn’t likely to ever use in the basement, and grabbed the boys, their non-toxic washable paints, went outside, and tried to wing it.

That’s never a good idea with two boys, by the way…

So we went outside, wrapped the batting around the stakes, and I drew a rough outline of a mouth and eyes on each ghost so that Sam could paint the face. Except Sam thought the ghosts should have noses. And John, who didn’t understand the spirit of the project, thought the ghosts needed some random paint dabs everywhere.

This ghost turned out fairly well in spite of everything.

The ghost on the left… well, it looks like it had a bad run in with a Dematerializer. LOL

 

But the boys had fun with it, they expressed themselves (Lefty The Ghost has three noses and two circular arms on his head), the boys feel a sense of accomplishment about the experience, and really, that’s all that matters, right?

In the future, I might try to make different tomato stake ghosts like the ones described here. But that’ll have to wait until the fun of painting crazy ghosts wears off. And who knows? With our twisted sense of humor around here — the Halloween Paint-Your-Own-Crazy-Ghost thing could become an annual tradition.

[Cross-posted from Re-Writing Motherhood]

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