Sunday, July 13, 2014

The Best Laid Plans

"Miss Maddie"
9X11
oil

This will be a short post. At least I think it will be. I have been very busy this week with my 8-year-old granddaughter. She had the notion that we should write a children's book together. She would provide (for the most part) the story, and I would do the illustrations. And now you know why I've been a little remiss with my posting.

Like many things in life, it seemed such a simple idea. And it started out to be just that. Simple. The story came together pretty quickly. We collaborated. I typed. Then came the illustrations. That started out simple as well. Until my inner perfectionist kicked in. One day last week we drove all the way to the big city (Tyler...not remotely a big city btw, for those of you who don't know) to pick up a few markers of varying values. Yes...of course they were professional grade. But I can use them again. Right?

Even so, I worked on the illustrations off-and-on all week and it came together pretty nicely. She did a couple of illustrations too, but she was smarter about it. She just did simple, child-like sketches and they turned out great.

The problem was putting it all together in order to make copies. It involved - as you can imagine - a lot of cutting and pasting...and printing out each page in order to fit in the illustrations. We went to Office Depot, and I went to work on my cutting and pasting, only to discover that I was missing a page. Back home. Printing out another page, then reconfiguring the rest of the pages in order to accommodate for the change of having added a page. Sigh...followed by bad thoughts and words in my head. Thoughts and words not appropriate for an 8-year-old. 
 
But we finally got it together. She's hocking these things shamelessly to anyone with $5 and a soft spot for 
children.  She's very driven. She's saving money to move to Madagascar when she's grown up. I don't know what that says about her feelings toward her family, including me, but there it is. Madagascar. She's saving up in order to move far, far away. But then, the best laid plans can change.

I guess this wasn't such a short post after all...