What I Did - and Didn't Do on My Summer Vacation

.

Having spent my entire life in the academic community the idea of “summer vacation” has remained more salient for me than for most adults.  Folks in the business community often hold this fantasy notion that those of us in education have the summer “off.”  Would that were so.  In reality - as I used to tell my junior colleagues - the quality of your Fall semester is determined by the time you put in preparing over the summer.  I never actually took a summer off. I taught summer school every year. It was an economic necessity, and in recent years, the students needed the summer school courses to meet their graduation target. But still in my life there was always this feeling of summer off even if the work load didn’t change.   

This summer was different. Since I am in “phased retirement” I don’t see students again until January. So for the first time since I was a student myself back in the mid-1970s, I actually had a summer off. I had big plans. Well, I actually had two plans. I was going to draw more. This was a particular challenge because, truth be told, I can’t draw. Oh, I can create sometimes pleasing images and enjoy doing so. What I mean when I say I can draw is I can look at something and create a recognizable recreation of the thing before me on paper or canvas.  So I was going try to take some steps toward that goal. My second big plan was to make significant progress on getting this blog into a manuscript form. The idea is to keep the original posts, no matter how embarrassing they might be in retrospect, but to clean up typos, etc.

So I packed up my necessary tools and tech and we took off to our home away from home up in Burr Ridge, IL, where Merle Smith, puts up with the chaos we bring along with a grace and generosity I hope one day to be able to emulate.  

Well as Bobby Burns put it, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.” or, “If something can go wrong it will go wrong.” As you know from previous posts - I did not plan to get pneumonia and visit the hospital. But I did. That pretty well put the kibosh on the editing plans. There is something about wide-spectrum antibiotics and editing prose that just does not go together.  I did however, largely pre-pneumonia get some work done on the drawing so I thought I would share that with you. So:

The Drawing I Did on My Summer Vacation

First,  I had to decide it was I wanted to draw. Fortunately, there was this really lovely statute out side our bedroom door. At first I thought it was a copy of James Earle Fraser's, The End of the Trail. But a closer look reveals that it isn’t; no native American, no spear. But the influence is obvious. 

Still I liked it, so I decided I would draw that. Now the thing that always screwed me up with drawing was the idea of being exact, details, details, details.  So I decided that I wouldn’t “draw” the statue. Instead I would sketch it.  You know free your inner DaVinci, move the pencil quickly. Talk to the pencil - “No, don’t go there!” Erase, erase, brush brush away the crumbs.

Oh, by the way, I went Michaels and bought their cheapest 11x14 plastic frame and drew a grid of 1 inch squares on it, marked the center with a red dot.  Every once in awhile I would hold it up and center the dot on the small piece of masking tape I had used to mark the center of the statue. That let me keep the sketch in proportion. 

So I sketched and sketched and came up with this:

OK, not terrible, but I didn’t like the head, so I went over and looked straight down on the head from the top.  I didn’t like the tail either. So. Erase, erase, erase, brush, brush. Sketch, sketch. And, voila:

I still knew that this was never going to turn into a “realistic drawing” so I took my eraser and my brush and my black ultra thin Sharpie and turned the sketch into the cartoon type drawing that I had used in my coloring book “Color Me Chilled Out” [Still available in some stores and from the author - moi!] That created the next step:

Then I took my cool new even thinner black marker purchased at Blick’s Art supplies in Wheaton, IL where I think I have cousins, and began to add the geometric details that I would later color:

And then I began to color. Always having been a fan of Gustav Klimt, I added some metallic markers to my palette. They look neat in the sun. And I got to this point:

And then I got sick. I actually was feeling better the last couple of days before we left and did a bit on the more on the drawing, I look forward to getting back to it.

Editing the Wall? Hmm. Do you realize that the year 2006 alone is more than 500 pages long? Let me think a bit more on that!

.