slightly wonky

The summer is winding down.  We’re in that odd time period between camp and school…the parental Twilight Zone.  (no…not with vampires, you young’uns…the old school one).  This is the place where time stands still and an endless refrain of “Mommy?…Mommy?…Mommy?…” lulls me into a semi-catatonic stupor whilst I aimlessly wander down the aisles at Stop & Shop and wonder when I can have my brain back.  I adore my child.  Really.  It’s just that the daily drudgery of adulthood sometimes saps my joie de vivre and makes me weary.  Why can’t I just play with playdoh all day and eat potato chips for dinner?  Oh yeah…because that’s not a job and I’ll be 300 lbs by the end of the first week.

My son made this drawing a few days ago.  Hilarious, right?  Doesn’t it kind of look like THIS?:

Or, is that just me?  (ahem…not LITERALLY…thankyouverymuch…)

Instead of growling, my son’s horrible beast is yelling, “BOO” repeatedly.  I’m going to have to find some “nice” drawings, in case the school psychologist wants to analyze what he creates.  At least he didn’t label the beast, “Mommy,” I suppose.

I haven’t gotten out to see ANY art as a result of my dearth of childcare.  We’ve been home creating all sort of random stuff with Lego:

We created a mini-city, shrinking down our usual scale of lego architecture.  Cute, right? The “building” with the banana on top made me think of this one in Japan:

That’s the Asahi Beer Building in Sapporo, Japan.  (I’ve actually been there.)  The thing on top of the building is supposed to be a yam, I think.  Only in Japan would a company decide to put a yam on their building.  We can’t pass judgement, as we do stuff like this:

Sigh.  That’s kind of sad.

Besides seeing no artwork this week (except for that created by my kindergartener) and getting barely any of work done, I got a new “toy”…check it out:

Nice, right????  No, it’s not a hot plate.  Pay attention.  It’s a super fun tablet for me to make remedial drawings on my computer!!!  Why remedial, you may ask?  Well, because I’m completely inept at Adobe Illustrator.  The pen tool?  Tool of the devil, more like it.  So far, there is a STEEP learning curve for me to EVER get the hang of it.  I’m basically trying to dig my way out of the Mariana Trench of ineptitude with a pressure sensitive stylus.  I did manage to scrawl out this today:

No, that’s NOT some kind of deformed slime creature from the swamp.  Yes, I was TRYING to draw with the stylus, and NOT my elbow.  That’s SUPPOSED to be a jade plant.  Egads.  If anyone out there wants to give me some Adobe Illustrator pointers, I’m all ears…or eyeballs…or whatever.  Why don’t I just pick up a pencil and draw it like a normal person?  Who knows?  Is it because I thrive on challenge?  If that were the case, I’d be homeschooling my son.  HAAA!  No way.  So, I don’t know what leads me to want to use a tablet and have to BASICALLY RE-LEARN how to draw.  It’s the masochist in me.  To give you an example of how hopeless I am…this was done in Illustrator by SOMEONE ELSE:

Illustration by www.khulsey.com

Hmmm….I have a lot to learn.  Perhaps I should use my tablet as a hot plate, and get back to my playdoh and potato chips???

I’ll try to do better next week…both in seeing art and doing art.  I’ll still be in the Twilight Zone, though, as my son doesn’t start school until Sept. 9.  In the meantime, I’m going to try to convince my son that letting mommy have some peace and quiet is just as important as getting two pieces of Lego unstuck and taking the wrapper off of a stubborn popsicle.