You know it’s October when the crows come into town. They circle our neighborhood like a motorcycle gang, chasing hawks and intimidating squirrels. They hang out on the telephone lines and the branches of trees with falling leaves. Great fun.
We got to see a local production of the Nutcracker yesterday (some very good friends/neighbor’s daughter was in it). Jack was sitting next to me giving me suggestions about the sketch — until the lights went down and the show began.
Joan organized a Holiday Boutique at the kids’ elementary school and the big event was this afternoon. Lily helped out at the button booth, making those buttons that you can pin on your shirt. Here she is working the machine. The kids in the foreground are a couple red-head boys drawing their designs to be pressed into a button. No, I didn’t make a mistake, she has actually dyed her hair green!
This is the button she made for me. I think it’s me and Joan in front of a Christmas tree. The faces are stickers she had.
The event. Joan is the woman in the middle of the picture, and yes, that’s Lily in the foreground.
This is when she wanted to go home to get a pair of pants so she could do “upside-down things”.
I have been working a lot lately, and not drawing for fun as much as I probably should, oh well –for a guy who’s basically freelance, it’s good to be working! So night before last we all went out to the local Mexican restaurant and the girls wrote their names on the backs of their kid’s menus, then came over to my side of the table and asked me to draw them under their names.
I like how Jane had to give me a credit on the bottom of her drawing. It’s funny, too, how she had to use my full name, as opposed to “Dad”. Kids are funny. You can almost make out what’s written on the other side of the paper too. Hopefully I’ll have some time to do some proper sketching here soon.
As we were cleaning out the garage a little while ago I stumbled upon these paintings we had done for Joan as a mother’s day gift about four years ago. (Note how much younger the kids look.) Anyway, I had bought four of those little nine-inch pre-stretched, pre-primed canvasses and asked the kids to paint her pictures while I painted them painting. Mine is really more of a sketch than a painting. I just drew with a fine point Sharpie directly on the canvass and colored it with the craft acrylics we had (you can see the bottles of paint on the table). I know this isn’t recent, but when I saw them I thought it would be fun to post.
I like this abstract one Lily painted 🙂
Today Jack and I went to our local barbershop. The only problem is that this is an old fashioned place, and my barber is well into his 80s, and Jack was not prepared for the amount of hair the kind gentleman would remove (despite my asking for a “trim”, etc). I like getting all that stuff out of my eyes, but to a 12-year-old it’s an entirely different deal. Oh well. Live and learn.
I have been inspired by Laura of Laurelines to do more color sketching, so I bought one of those little 3″ x 4″ moleskine cold-press watercolor sketchbooks. For years I’ve avoided cold-press paper, not liking the “bumpy” texture; but I think my drawing style is evolving to a place less controlled and more into accidents. I like cold-press now.
Anthony Zierhut 
