A month back, I and my 8-year-old daughter had a drawing competition. The challenge was paint a dog without looking at it. I asked her to allow me to look at a picture since I am not good at animal drawing.
At first, she was unwilling to bend rules since the whole point was painting by memory.
But after some negotiation (“I will not play with you anymore!”), I was allowed a brief look (“Okay, fine! But only 10 seconds!”).
I quickly pulled out a doggy pic from Google and concentrated at it for 10 second. My daughter counted seconds in the background, declining the offer to look at it herself (“I don’t cheat like you!”). Then the picture was closed.
It took me 10 minutes to draw the picture directly with sketch colours (since I was too busy to use pencil first. Here it is.
If you think it was cheap of me to force an 8-year-old girl to allow me to cheat during a competition, you should look at what she drew using just her memory.
There was no competition–She is a pro, I am still learning!
I have a bone to pick with Leonardo da Vinci–why did he chose to present Monalisa in such a way: all black, pulled back hair, receding hairline, black veil?
Every time I see that portrait in a photo (I don’t have the money to go to France to see the painting in person.), I think of a new widow. The mysterious smile makes me wonder if she murdered her husband 🔪 and got away with it. The roaming eyes 👀 just add to the story, like she is watching everyone wondering when someone 🕵️♂️will figure it out.
Why couldn’t he have made her laughing like a real person. And he could have given her more hair! He knew enough art to pull that off without causing offence! My little maestro managed to create it in 5 seconds!
Of you wondering about mistaken identity, my daughter has assured me the this is The Monalisa (see hands). 😂
This painting is currently hanging in the bathroom of her newest little doll house, this time made of paper. Why bathroom? Because that was the only room with enough wall space. The little paper doll looks extremely comfortable showing us around all the rooms.
The house is 3D with a door 🚪that opens into the curtained room, with the bedroom on the other side. The doll can get inside the bed🛌, and the two-door almirah opens to show various dresses 👗👘💃which the doll can wear (my contribution is the kimono she is wearing).
The doll can slide inside the bath tub 🛀 and toilet 🚽 has a door for privacy 😁The dining room fridge is stacked with cakes 🎂 and icecreams 🍦and the wall cabinets 🗄️can be opened to put in stuff (I don’t think the doll has learnt cooking yet, so they are still empty.). She eats at the dining table after sliding comfortably in the chair🪑. She has also created a supermarket but it is not sufficiently stacked so retraining from sharing. So far, a satisfactory arrangement for a two-inch doll.
This January, I was at mom’s and had a bit of time at hand so I drew these 5-minute sketches (using the pictures I had taken during our visit to the zoo) to entertain my daughter while she practiced writing hindi alphabets.
Tiger under the shade of bamboo treesA pair of alligators, originally two separate pictures of alligatorsPeacock on a tree branch (there were peacocks every where that day)A pair of ostriches (originally two shots of the same ostrich)A crane ready to launch out of the tree into the lake below (there were cranes everywhere too)
Now, my daughter has started water colours this month and as a gesture of comraderie, I joined in the fun and made these.
The same pair of ostriches created from memoryJungle fowl
Here is the only one where I took a bit of time, around 30 mins.
Back of a golden pheasant
My reintroduction to art is so much fun I am having a hard time stopping to live the real life.
My daughter was born Leonardo Da Vinci and she is just improving from thereon.
I still remember the eight legged lion with its legs sprawled out like a pretty spider, the minimalistic designs of a fish without fins and tail, the cat without limbs and kittens with various degrees of abilities (no hands no legs, hands but no legs, legs but no tail) and her adopted monkey baby.
But now those days are gone and what I see is real stuff.
Please don’t ask the logic of the train, elephant and giraffe in front of the cottage. The cat and rabbit make sense with the girl, so please be grateful for that. I have seen weirder stuff.
The new and improved variety of lion and tiger, along with giraffe half-hidden behind a kangaroo, along with a hippo (pink), gazelle and crocodile (guess?). The outline of the girl can be accepted as a jungle sprite looking over these creatures…
And then there is stuff like this which is actually is superb considering it comes from a 4-year old working only with her imagination.
I’m sure she’ll turn out to be a far better painter than her mom. 😁
I mentioned a couple of projects for my daughter in my last post, but elaborated only one–the folding kitchen. Well, the other one is a jungle/zoo/farm backdrop.
Everybody at home had been complaining about how my daughter’s toy animals turn up everywhere in the house at the most inopportune moment, like on the floor under your bare feet, on the pillows when your head hits it too hard, on the chair seat when you are too tired to check before sitting, under the bed where you can’t pull them out without getting yourself dirty, behind the huge almirah which needs four grown up men to move (we have only three at home)…
I guess, the herbivores have the habit of running away to go looking for grass and plants, and the carnivores follow them to eat them…
Well, it became important to build a ranch/sanctuary/safeplace where they were allowed to roam. It also helps my daughter create stories that I could, then, publish in the blog (Hah! Mastermind me, stealing stories of the minions…).
So, I used an old flat cardboard box to build the backdrop with water colours (all that I could find at home during lockdown).
The walls have silhouette of a deep forest.
I also built a detachable cave and a hollow tree out of a plastic box. The 4-year-old Madame Leonardo Da Vinci coloured it to perfection.
The forest comes with yellow and red trees built out of old coloured cardboard boxes. It also has a fishy pond and an even fishier river that can be moved around at will. These were made of the old plastic sheets from my old organiser diary. The stones donated by an unsuspecting relative add to the effect.
To ensure flexibility to convert it to a zoo, we have combined it with a set of foldable cardboard cages and coloured by the family artist a few months earlier.
The piece is a continuous work in progress since we plan to add grass, a few more trees, a lying down hollow tree, and other cool stuff to build stories. We are gradually working towards adding farm buildings to the set as well. I’m looking forward to building a nice blue ocean out of the box top, thanks to my daughter’s new found love for water creatures.
The best part is that it also works as storage space for all these sets.
All in all the hard work seems to have paid off, considering the time my daughter spends with the set. I had too much fun…so there’s that too.
My daughter is a minimalist. Her paintings contain only what is absolutely necessary. For example:
Two caterpillars and half-a-fish
Her caterpillars have multiple feet, yet her fish is an oval without fins or tail…but what’s the big deal! The fish knows she needs neither fins nor feet while living out of water. She is what she is and that should suffice.
Two horned (African) Rhino
This two horned Rhino…just so that you know, the horns are blue triangle patches and round orange patches are the eyes. She told me it is African, and hence the two horns.
Monkey atop a fish’s head
Her monkey has no hands nor legs but makes do with his tail. No need to add extra weight to his frail body that already carries the weight of an oversized head. The head beneath him belongs to a fish (a hammer head shark, it seems from the shape of it!).
Cat with her litter of five kitten and an adopted monkey.
The best part is the cat. She has two legs and a tail, and a litter of five kitten-blue and black. All her babies are unique in shape and have different characteristics (two legs, no legs; ears, no ears; body, no body…). She also seems to have adopted a yellow baby monkey (because I have been assured by the painter herself that it is indeed a baby monkey and not a cat). He also seems to be wearing a monocle on his eye, however, the painter declined to comment. I believe diversity and inclusion is the cause.
She created all these paintings in her first attempt at painting on the day she turned three. It was a hasty work to finish the masterpieces before any interception from a meddling mother.
The background was the walls of the playschool I had created for my daughter on her birthday out of an old refrigerator box (since she could not go to Playschool this year, thanks to COVID 19). My daughter quickly painted the inside walls while I was busy arranging food for hungry mouths. I hadn’t even finished sticking chartsheets on the outer surfaces by then. She had a gala time.
But now the playhouse had to be retired because of its depleted condition. I have pictures for memories though.
Here is some work we had done together on the walls. I had written a couple of posts about it earlier.
The guy often flies pretty close to the ground and I can often take clear pictures of him from my roof while he makes baby deliveries. He was rather pleased with his last post–It brought him quite a lot of fans, so he is posing for more.
If you notice, the picture is looking doen upon this flying beauty. It is because I am on my fourth story roof and he flying at third story level.
Not sure why but Egrets always look to me like grumpy old men. Their expression is always downcast and sad, shoulders hunched…I love them for their grumpiness.
Kingfishers are a common sight where I live. Though weirdly, there are no fishes in here. I’ve seen them feed on dragon flies and bees. May be they should be renamed as Bee-eaters but the real Bee-eaters might get offended…
In an attempt to give my daughter company during her ‘painting’ escapades, I created this on a rough page with her wax colours. Then she decided the rest of page wasn’t colourful enough and added stuff of her own. I would have kept it too, but leaving a Kingfisher in company of a Lion is rather cruel.
So I cut it out of the paper.
Then she wanted to ‘take a closer look’, so I took a picture to immortalize it in case she decided to go ninja on him.
Short Stories | Fish-eye Perspective 