Holiday Paddle Boarding

A compilation of our Winter Break... sort of.

I am going to work on explaining this tomorrow... or maybe even on finishing it.  That poor bee is missing a leg.  Although, that may well have been the case by the time my kids got done with him....

DeadMaul / Darth Pool

Darth Maul and Deadpool in a double headlock.

Or, what is black and red all over?
(Comic books featuring Deadpool or Darth Maul)

Or, what goes black, red, black, red, black red?
(Deadpool and Darth Maul wrestling)

Pathetic, I know. My kids did not even find those amusing.

The morally questionable guys in red and black continue to be compelling at our house. Our younger son has not had the pleasure of viewing the "Phantom Menace" movie to see Darth Maul's first appearance.  But he was still pretty happy to see Maul reappear in the recent "Star Wars Rebels" season 2 finale, trying to entice the adolescent protagonist, Ezra, over to the dark side.

And Maul has that double lightsaber, so how could he not be cool?
And Deadpool is just Deadpool...and somehow the epitome of cool lately.

For some reason, my cell phone camera can't deal with the color red, so all of the subtlety and tonal range in the drawing seems to drop out of the digital image... (That's right, I just used the words "subtlety and tonal range" in regard to a drawing on a napkin.) This technology has improved a lot over the last few years. Previous red napkins looked much worse. But it still has a ways to go.
You will just have to trust me that the napkin looks better in person.

On another uninteresting technical note: I had a lot of trouble sorting this image out- figuring out which arm belonged to whom, and what part should be in shadow or in light.  So I am posting a flipped version of the image below so it might make more sense.

And of course it is a napkin, so perhaps there is no permanent right side up.

Ezra Bridger and Kylo Ren

Ezra, the adolescent hero from the animated show "Star Wars Rebels" and the big bad guy from the upcoming "The Force Awakens." They might be having fun...or engaged in a mortal struggle...we're not really sure.

This is the napkin that I was supposed to be working on during our appearance on the Good Morning America 40th anniversary live steam Star Wars segment last night. I did not make a whole lot of progress on it at ABC. We managed to shift the emphasis to the kids...well...pretty much just being themselves, rather than me trying to ink a napkin, which was definitely not going to make for exciting viewing.

At first, the boys were grouchy about having to take the train back into Manhattan on a school night. Then they were really annoyed that no one would give them the passcode for the ABC wifi (the nerve of those corporate security types!) and that they had to entertain themselves with offline games while we waiting in the green room with a rather depleted snack table. But they were thoroughly impressed by the other Star Wars content that preceded us: $3000 of Star Wars toys together on one coffee table! A family who built their sons AT-AT bunk beds! Another family who installed an enormous light-up replica of the Death Star on the roof of their home!

The kids managed to pull it together and be pleasant on camera when it was our turn. Our older son was so naturally chatty while offering his opinions on the relative merits of the several movies in the franchise, that the GMA host Dan Harris suggested that he might have a future in television.

By the time we left at 8 pm, the boys had downed a couple of cans of soda each and were revoltingly full of energy. They felt the appropriate post broadcast activity would be a trip to a toy store to buy Star Wars toys. We walked about 10 blocks bickering before I convinced them that their plan was not going to pan out.

I finished the napkin after I finally got them to wind down and go to sleep at 10pm.

My younger son specifically requested the combination of Ezra and Kylo for this napkin. But he and his brother would like to point out that Ezra would be much older by the time he might have encountered this particular character.  I couldn't cope with the task of aging Ezra while trying to keep him recognizable, so I assuming a time portal or some other excuse for the two guys being on the same napkin.

Got to keep these drawings plausible.

StarWars.com Coverage of Napkins

Amy Radcliffe wrote a nice post about our napkin series "Star Wars Characters Ride Dinosaurs"

You can see it at this link.

Thanks Amy!

Hera from Star Wars Rebels on Pteranodon

Star Wars Rides Dinosaurs #5:

I have not been following "Star Wars Rebels," the latest animated Star Wars TV show, very carefully. Hera Syndulla is one of the band of rebels, and I think, the captain and pilot of their ship. She is a Twi'lek,  one of the humanoid, but not human, species in the Star Wars universe. This means, (fun facts that I just learned on the "Wookiepedia" today) that parts of her brain are located in her "head-tails" and that her eyebrows are tatooed on.

I felt I had been shirking the color possibilities of the dinosaurs in the series so far, making them all an amorphous grey/green. Of course, no one knows for sure what sort of coloring would be accurate....

The color scheme definitely got away from me on this one.  The greyish green solution looks pretty good in retrospect.

Ahsoka Tano Rides the Spinosaurus

The Apprentice Returns on a Spinosaurus:
(Star Wars Rebels meet Jurassic Park/World #3)

I did not consult the kids on this one, but somehow it made sense to me to put Ahsoka on the big bad of the third Jurassic Movie. Perhaps that movie is not fresh in your mind. I certainly could not remember it until I saw it recently. It is likely that I never saw it at all when it was released in 2001. At any rate, the Spinosaurus makes several appearances, eats several people, part of a plane and, presumably, a T-rex that it has killed.

I thought Ahsoka deserved a powerful dinosaur capable of vanquishing a Tyrannasaurus.  The Jurassic Park Spinosaurus also has a rather decorative skin with blue and orange markings on its "sail," so I hoped it would go nicely with Ahsoka's decorative "headtails." Sady, I did not have time to deal with dinosaur markings last night and had to more or less resort to amorphous dino grey/green.

The boys were very excited to see Ahsoka's reappearance in the recent episode of Star Wars Rebels. She was a big hit in the previous series, The Clone Wars. She appeared on several of my younger son's napkins long ago in the days before I started posting them here. Ahsoka was even so cool that my older son's best friend and Star Wars play pal was willing to "be" Ahsoka while my son was being Captain Rex or Anakin Skywalker. Unfortunately, the younger brother eventually received the message from his preschool classmates that it was not cool to like Ahsoka because, you know, she was not male.

Below is one of his Ahsoka napkins from 2008 or 2009, before gender conformity set in (and back when I was more sane and spent no more than 5 minutes on the drawings)

 

And one from three years later that did not go to school because it was deemed to be too icky:

I am also pleased to see Ahsoka's return.

Star Wars' Ezra Bridger Rides Blue from Jurassic World

This is definitely the Velociraptor that you are looking for:
The kid with blue hair rides the blue raptor.

My younger son told me last night that "Star Wars Rebels characters riding Jurassic World dinosaurs is the thing that we are doing now."  Well, alright. Since Star Wars Jedis are supposedly able to use the "Jedi Mind Trick" to control animals, I guess this is as plausible as anything else that goes on here.

We are crossing corporate boundaries, however. My older son opined that perhaps a series of Star Wars and Jurassic World team ups might be a bad idea as it could encourage Disney to purchase the Jurassic Park franchise also. (Because these napkins are so very influential!) I explained that Jurassic World was a Universal property at the moment and was therefore probably safe from Disney.

Ezra, the teenage star of Rebels, was the obvious choice for the next napkin.  The kids debated who he should be riding, but I have to say that Blue from the "Raptor Squad" was really the only choice.

My son did not like Ezra's riding position. I did not bother to explain that I was trying to hide as much of his body as possible so I would not have to draw it.

This two napkins a night thing is definitely not going to work out.

Darth Vader Rides the Indominus Rex from "Jurassic World"

Don't underestimate the power of the dark side:

I did not have much success putting members of the cast of "Inside Out" on dinosaurs yesterday, but "Star Wars" characters seem to be another matter. The first new episode of "Star Wars Rebels" rolled out over the weekend, so the Sith Lord was an obvious choice for dino riding today.

I haven't had an opportunity to draw Darth Vader since my older son's obsession with "Star Wars" 7 or 8 years ago. I've missed the reflective possibilities in his helmet. Despite my parents' general polite lack of interest in Star Wars, they had a very realistic, wearable, Darth Vader helmet in their office since the early 80's. Perhaps my soft spot for the helmet really has more to do with that.

The Vader helmet attended a 5th birthday with Grandpa a few years ago:

Chopper from Star Wars Rebels and TrashCat

Internet Cats & Robots Day 5:
Grumps in cylinders.
Trashcat and C1-10P are not amused by their appearance on this napkin.

Trashcat's image and lack of amusement seems to have been a  2007 follow- up to 2003's "Limecat is not pleased." The catchphrases of "so and so is not amused, is not pleased, does not approve, etc" combined with images of surly looking cats or celebrities proliferated all over the web.  Or so I read, no one was sending me images of lolcats at the time.

This was another case of a pairing of cat and robot based mostly on shape....Although Chopper is a rather cranky droid, well known for both his lack of compliance and disapproval of human antics, so they do have the "disapproving entity in a can" characteristic in common.

Fyrnock from Star Wars Rebels

One of the "Angry Toothlesses."
These critters have appeared in a couple recent episodes of "Star Wars Rebels."

I will have to admit that I did not pay very close attention to those episodes.  While we watched the last one earlier this week, I was busy picking through Ansel's hair, trying to determine whether he really had lice again, or was just psychosomatically itchy.

Trying to figure out what the "Fyrnocks" were called and actually looked like presented an extra challenge last night that I did not appreciate. (I was still exhausted from washing or bagging everything that the kids' hair might have touched during the last couple of weeks.)  Usually it is quite easy to quickly find out the name and more than you possibly need to know about any creature in the Star Wars universe.  I speak from ample experience.  There was, however, a bit of a dearth of info and images on the topic of Fyrnocks.

Archer and Ansel had been calling them "Angry Toothlesses" for their resemblance to the Dreamworks dragon character. This seems to be an apt name as Ezra, the boy character in "Rebels," has some sort of control over them not entirely unlike Hiccup's relationship with Toothless.

I briefly considered drawing the two boys and the two dragonish creatures.... but after all the laundry, I felt fortunate to just draw some teeth and glowing eyes.

And, no, the kids don't have lice....any more....I hope....

Chopper and Echo

Cute sentient robots from "Star Wars Rebels" and "Earth to Echo" meet cute.

"Earth to Echo" was recently released to DVD and on demand, so Ansel insisted that we had to watch it again. 

Very reminiscent of "E.T.," the movie combines two of Ansel's favorite things, an insipidly cute alien, and kids acting on their own, completely free of adult supervision. 

Three boys discover "Echo" out in the scrub and spend an entire night helping the little extraterrestrial find the parts he needs to repair himself and reassemble his spaceship. They lie to their rather oblivious parents, ride their bicycles on highways in the dark, break into various commercial and residential locations to help Echo find parts, and tangle with a potentially evil adult wearing an orange safety vest who seems to know something about what is going on. As the kids and alien finally triumph in the morning and a huge spaceship assembles itself in the sky over their suburban subdivision, one of the kids exclaims proudly, "We did this!" 

Aside from the distractingly jittery hand-held camera work- supposedly one of the kids is shooting the night's events on video- "Earth to Echo" is a fairly entertaining, kid friendly story. I was able to sit through it two times without too much discomfort.

Given my role as the mother of two boys who would love to have a darling alien provide them with an excuse for subterfuge and misdemeanors, however, I view the ending with a somewhat jaundiced eye.  I have to wonder if after making his kid-enabled escape, Echo might be able to return with a fleet of space ships carrying alien overlords bent on enslaving the human race, or sucking all the salt out of the earth's oceans, or blowing up our solar system to make way for an intergalactic highway...

Wicket and Chopper with Candy Corn

Short and grumpy, yet still irreverently endearing.

As I needed to paint a lot of straps onto a pair of sweatpants for Archer's costume for today's incredibly important Middle School Halloween Dance last night, I warned Ansel that I might not be able to manage a good drawing for today's napkin. (Hint: there is a tall stack of napkins that have not been to school yet, choose one of those.)

He offered, "Oh, you don't have to do much. Just draw an Ewok."

Ansel told me he has been hoping that Ewoks will turn up on the new "Star Wars Rebels" TV show.  I said something noncommittal about how there are a lot of aliens to choose from in the Star Wars (expanded) universe.  He responded, "Well, they have picked mostly pedestrian aliens for the show so far." 

Ansel had apraxia in his early life (a neurological based speech disorder) and sometimes, even at seven years old, he is not saying what I think he is saying. So I asked somewhat condescendingly, "What do you mean by 'pedestrian?'  That word means someone who is walking.  It can also mean boring or uninspired..." 

He responded, somewhat irritated by my question, "Yes, I know. That is why I used the word."

Alright. I guess an Ewok would not be a pedestrian choice.

Garazeb Orrelios From Star Wars Rebels

Ansel has been resistant to all things Star Wars for so long that his burgeoning enthusiasm for  the new Disney incarnation of the franchise, "Star Wars Rebels," is slightly disconcerting for me.

His older brother was a Star Wars obsessive for several years, but mostly back in his early childhood before I started posting napkins online. There were many, many Clone Wars themed napkins, as Archer was a big fan of the earlier animated series by Genndy Tarakovsky. Those shorts were released on Cartoon Network from 2003-5 back when I was a virtuous new mother and Archer was not watching any television beyond the occasional "Baby Einstein" video. He got to know them later on DVD.

We conscientiously held off on letting Archer see even "A New Hope" (The original 1977 movie, for those who are not within the fold) until he was almost six years old.  This feat of superior parenting was immediately rendered pathetically laughable as Ansel, still a toddler, was in the room for that first viewing. 

During the period while we were admirably sparing Archer's tender young imagination from the overwhelming pressure of the movie itself (and sparing ourselves all of the "pew-pew-pew"-ing and "light saver" slashing that was to come), I worked hard  to find age appropriate books  that would scratch the Star Wars itch and provide Archer with enough information to allow him to keep up with his cool friends who had already seen the whole series of movies by ages 4 or 5.  I found the original manga series based on the first two movies, and we read the near dozen Dark Horse produced Clone Wars graphic novels by the Fillbach brothers until their pages fell out.  Archer knew as much or more about the "expanded universe" than most of his friends who had just been allowed to see the damn movies.  He was able to pick the words "Luke Skywalker" out of a dense block of text long before he officially even began to try to read.

Archer was further incited to encyclopedic knowledge of all things Star Wars because his best friend's father plays a not in substantial role in the Star Wars pop culture empire as a successful writer of reference coffee table books and fiction.  Archer could go over for an afternoon playdate and hang out in an apartment that had a life-size storm trooper lurking in the corner and an exhilaratingly extensive selection of action figures thoughtfully curated by an educated adult proponent of the franchise. The two boys had hours long discussions of the minutia of the various powers and fates of obscure characters.  All questions, like the correct pronunciation of the name of the planet "Coruscant" could be answered.

Spectating on years of all of this Star Wars obsession, Ansel decided he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.  Ansel is usually pulled helplessly along into whatever topic his big brother is focused on this particular week, but apparently he had to make a stand somewhere. Dislike of Star Wars had been his one significant rebellion.

Beaten down by two maniacally contrarian sons and eleven years without a full night of sleep, I have long ago abandoned the parenting high ground of offering edifying age-appropriate books in place of television and movies.  However, I still find myself advocating for Star Wars because we do have several bookshelves of the stuff, and much of it is at a good reading level for a second grader.

Unfortunately, Ansel remains exclusively interested in "Rebels," perhaps because his brother seems completely unmoved by it.