august 4

08-04-15 "walking coneflower"
08-04-15 “walking coneflower”

5×3.5″ acrylic on paper

Let me explain. Sometimes on long road trips (and maybe other times, too), my mom would engage me in a fun (and funny) art activity. She would fold a piece of paper. One of us would draw the top of something (the head of an animal, a plant, a person—anything that would work) and then the “neck” only would be extended to the lower half of the paper. The first artist would pass the folded piece of paper with the blank lower half showing (and what they had just drawn, hidden), and the other one of us would draw the bottom of something using the neck marks as a guide—without looking at the top drawing. As you can imagine, this resulted in some pretty weird looking creatures in the end!

Here, I had already folded a couple of pieces of paper, so I did the bottom half of this one yesterday and the top half today (and for tomorrow’s, I did the top half yesterday and bottom half today). I did a little bit of rough sketching with pencil on some of it, but mostly just painted on with acrylic (which I had never used for this activity before).

I debated about even posting these as dailies, but the memory of this childhood joy outweighed my reticence. It works a lot better with someone else who doesn’t know what you’ve painted. I am happy to say that my memory is good enough that I remembered mostly what I painted on the first sides, but I had already hidden those sides this morning and did not reference what I had done until after the second side was completed.

A fun little diversion.