Helmets on the Subway

What if we could all wear our favorite helmets on the train?

Everyone is absorbed in their phone on the subway- a sort of digital, mental helmet.

But wouldn’t it be more fun to wear a Fortnite or Halo helmet? And you could worry less about other people sneezing and coughing on you.

I started thinking about this after watching our younger son wear a cardboard helmet on the way home from camp.

I seem compelled to draw things on the subway, though the environment is clearly way too complicated for my skill set (and maybe the napkin genre) 

Just struggling to put one thing in front of another lends a weird outsidery art quality to the endeavor. And as a teacher at an institution that grants MFAs, I am afraid that my outsider privileges have been permanently revoked. Hashtag “notoutsiderartjustawkwarddrawing”

And despite the crowded train scene, I only managed to include 7 helmets, just the tip of the desirable helmet iceberg around here.

Helmeted Knight with Background Dragon

Our younger son is working on a video at camp that features a knight and a dragon. We spent the Fourth of July making the knight’s helmet pictured here out of cardboard.

Fashioning compound curves out of corrugated materials proved way more challenging than I anticipated. I vaguely remember knocking out a cardboard “Captain Rex” Star Wars clone trooper helmet in an evening with time left over to draw the rest of the costume in Sharpie on white pajamas many years ago... So many years ago that my older son was young enough to develop a life threatening need for a clone trooper costume the night before Halloween...and apparently I was young and foolish enough to make him one. 

I don’t remember that helmet being so challenging, but perhaps I was just not sleeping enough at the time to form accurate long term memories.

Or maybe this loss of helmet building skill is a symptom of progressive cognitive decline: losing one’s keys, poor word retrieval, and the “inability to fashion helmets out of flat materials”

In fact, I am a little sleep deprived right now. Can you tell?

My son is now telling me that we need to remake the helmet over the weekend as he has decided that it requires a more complicated design.

At least the dragon is two dimensional.

Here’s the previous helmet from way back in 2009
Maybe it was more impressive in my memory...

Person in Boxes

The cliche that small children always enjoy the box that a gift came in more than the gift itself was certainly true here. 

Now that the kid is no longer so small, there might be something more strange going on. (No gifts involved.)

Cardboard Progeny

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful”:

Hideous Progeny / Inktober 2017 drawing 3

Cardboard Friend Arrives for Lunch

 Because all the good stuff in life can now be delivered to your house in a cardboard box....right?

Yesterday morning, as I was pedaling them to school, the boys were discussing "Cardboard Friend" and how we should purchase one.

Cardboard in general has always been a popular yet problematic topic at our house.  During our early frugal and overachieving parenting days, (in other words, when we only had one child), we used to make out of cardboard whatever toy Archer thought he really needed to have.  We constructed a pirate ship, a castle, Star Wars vehicles, power tools, and my husband's special contribution, a rolling lawnmower. In the spirit of full disclosure, these items were most often made out of Fresh Direct Boxes, which were arriving at our house with alarming frequency, often containing only one loaf of bread, or two artisanal pickles. We did our best  to convince ourselves and anyone else who would listen that we were doing something positive with our first world problem of having too many boxes.

At the time, I fantasized that I was teaching Archer important values: "Why should we buy this cheap plastic toy that you think you want when we can work together to create a more interesting one for free?"  Those who have kids, or really anyone who can remember being a child, knows what the flaw in this edifying line of reasoning is.  Beyond that, what I was really doing was training a demanding junior art director: "No Mom, the castle should have three towers and a working drawbridge!" A child who who believed that his parents should spend huge amounts of time building things to his specifications.  And when you are talking to a three or four year old, and you say "Let's make a lawn mower!" what you really mean is "I will make this for you while you whine endlessly about how it is taking too long."

We have continued to try build things out of cardboard in my studio over the last few years, so Archer and Ansel decided that "we" should make a Cardboard Friend ourselves.

I did a little bit of research last night and, ugh, learned more than I care to detail here. To be brief: there was a kid character kid dressed as a cardboard robot called "Danbo" in a popular Japanese manga back in 2007.  This box robot was later reproduced as a toy and was disseminated to broad internet fame in the following years.  There are Amazon and 7-11 logo box versions and thousand upon thousands of "fan art" photographs of these cute boxbots in every possible locale engaged in every possible activity.  If you are interested in the details, or wish to become one of the over 144,000 fans of Danbo on facebook, "Know Your Meme" has an informative "danbo" page.  Or you can buy one at Amazon, with the amazon.com.jp logo on it for only $19.95.

Archer tells me that he likes the idea of Cardboard Friend as a "being invested with mystical power." Yes, those were his exact words.  I have some mixed feelings about the ubiquity of cardboard in our lives, and for the moment, I am going to try to resist buying a Cardboard Friend or even making one of our own.

But I did draw one popping out of Ansel's lunch bag.


Below some of the cardboard building at our house 2006-2013.  And no, I don't think I can find a picture of that spectacular lawnmower.

...But wait... several hours later, a photo of the famed lawn mower has been found:

And here's one of the castle  because I clearly cannot stop myself:

Cardboard Teleport Time Machine with Time Vortex and Domo

Time travel in honor of the New Year:

The kids built themselves this vehicle out of a couple of leftover Christmas gift containing shipping boxes.  Neither of them has watched much "Doctor Who" but this does not mean they aren't interested in (and in Archer's case, a self proclaimed authority on) the topic of time vortexes.  I was instructed to draw them with Domo, their most recently acquired stuffed toy.

They had a long list of complaints about this one...Just a sampling: they were in the wrong positions in the box- (Archer was supposed to be driving, not Ansel), it was not "science-fictiony" enough, Domo was supposed to be in a "turret," Archer was supposed to look like a "Dark Elf"... and so on...

Cardboard Pacific Rim Jaeger with "Cardboard" Characters

We read Doug TenNapel's "Cardboard" again over the weekend.
While we made some more cardboard stuff, we were not able to pull off the fabrication of a huge mech like "Pacific Rim"s Gypsy Danger.

Cardboard LEGO Batman

LEGO Batman, complete with batarang, gets the Doug TenNapel magic cardboard treatment today.

My sons were very much looking forward to the release of the latest LEGO dvd: "LEGO Batman: The Movie- DC Super Heroes Unite" is the complete title I believe.  Multiple reviews explaining that it is not much more than the cut scenes from the video game did not deter them from insisting that I should buy it.

Teen Titans Robin Made of Doug TenNapel's Magic Cardboard

Ansel was so impressed with James Grashow's cardboard version of a Bernini fountain (pictured in the NY Times), that we had to read Doug TenNapel's Cardboard again last night.

There is no doubt what sort of person we would fabricate if we had magic cardboard that could come to life.

Ansel asked me hopefully this morning if I had made an actual cardboard model of Robin in order to make the drawing.  Disappointingly, no.