Sunday, August 26, 2007

Poke-a-what?

I thought I'd finally post something! I started school with the boys two weeks ago, we are following a pretty structured schedule now and so far so good. Last week's impromptu art lesson, jumping off from something the boys were already "into," was to create their own Pokemon character in a crayon/watercolor resist. They had already been busy making (rather crudely) some of their very own Pokemon cards drawn out in colored pencil on index cards and then roughly cut to size. My idea was to make a larger painting of one of their favorites. It took very little to motivate them, in fact they were busy before I finished giving them some basic instructions. Today, after fiddling around with the scanner and changing some preexisting cards, at K's request, I thought, we should actually make their paintings into cards. This became an all day project of figuring out the software and remembering once learned, and soon forgotten, computer graphics skills I picked up in high school.

The paintings:



As you can see, K already added some of the card info to his painting.








OK, now their cards. I had to squish D's "Spiraly" to get him to fit our format, and they aren't perfect, but certainly satisfactory for a first time effort, I think.



Twice this week I received emails from different friends with a link to this ebay item. There's a very funny story that goes along with the Pokemon theme here, about shopping with lots of children, and how sometimes we buy things we never even meant to. She is a kindred "mommy blogger" check out her other funny writings here.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

Guess who?


OK, you probably guessed who easy enough, but can you guess when?

Today I've been organizing and tidying and throwing out bunches of junk that has been cluttering up my desk and making room for the scanner. I found this old first grade (possibly kindergarden) picture in the heaps. I discovered this cool program on my computer that will organize pictures into photo album pages. I haven't actually tried it out yet, but what a neat-o concept, eh?

Last night I saw Harry Potter 5. It was super good, I had forgotten much of the plot in that one. In fact when I started reading HP7, I had to go back and skim through HP6 because I had forgotten some really important events. I read #6 while pregnant with L and pregnancy clouds my memory. So I absolutely positively LOVED Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It was superb! Even fundamentalist-witch-hating-Christians who dare to read it will see how beautiful the story is.

*MK at Ganap! clued me in to a great review of HP7 from Christianity Today. Read it here.

Scan On!



I just installed a scanner (no longer wanted by my pop) and was finally able to scan in the boys' Chinese scroll paintings they made in May. They used water color paints and then I made a "chop" from a potato so they could stamp their initial on the painting. K's is a panda and D's is a fox in a mountain cave.

Now that I've got scanner powers... I hope to be able to put up a lot more fun stuff.