Portuguese Water Dog

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws..."
Or just one big claw and a happy dog on a beach...

We had a lovely trip to a friend's house out on Long Island last week.
We got to hang out with his dog and see thousands of lopsided fiddler crabs scuttling around furiously (fleeing from us of course) on the tidal beach.

Not that the dog and the crabs were the only highlights of the trip.
In all honesty, the dog was not pleased to be on the beach on that particular day. And the crabs didn't want to hang out with us any day, ever.

But they were the only two features of the trip that I could readily combine into a silly drawing that somehow seemed appropriate to me. (Maybe just me?)

Thanks so much for letting us stay at your cool house Alex!

Actual Atlantic Marsh Fiddler Crabs (Uca Pugnax):
From the web, demonstrating the one oversize "cheliped" on the males:

And from my video of the mass crab flight from the scary humans:

Thank You Note (Again)

Absorb Any Thankfulness Today?

My sons had a great summer at camp. One was a camper and was an "intern in training."

As always, it was, and is, difficult to come up with an appropriate way to thank the people who are generous enough to teach my kids. I have enormous admiration for people who work skillfully with children (and with my kids in particular!) since I am a pathetic amateur always in need of improvement in this area. 

And how can we express this enormous gratitude? With a briefly executed sketch on a non archival paper product of course.

Unfortunately, I did not get to spend much time on this one unfortunately. It suffers from a bit too much unintentional awkwardness...unlike the intentional awkwardness of the other napkins. Ha ha.

But the kids do look a little bit like our kids.

And they did not actually have to pose for the thank you note. While they may not have felt consciously appreciative of that, there was an absence of their usual complaints, so I was extra thankful about that also.

The Fruit Viking is Grateful

No child was made sticky during the drawing of this napkin.

It's that time again....
The end of the school year has arrived and there are people to whom we cannot possibly express enough appreciation....
The solution once again is a clumsy portrait of the kid on a napkin and some pretentious chocolate bars.

Astoundingly, my son was not offended by this drawing. He usually objects to any drawing that I do of him because there is always something wrong with the likeness. But not this time. I am perplexed.

He himself requested the watermelon helmet. His school mascot is supposedly a Viking, although I was unable to find any associated imagery associated online. While aimlessly Googling for Viking pictures, we came across the fruit helmet as a display if not an actual wearable. (But there are plenty of people actually wearing them...)

While we did purchase a large, and rather mediocre, watermelon at Cosco over the weekend, no rind helmets were actually worn during the production of this napkin.

What the kids really wanted to do with the melon was smash it with a sledgehammer, or make it  explode using rubber bands.

Thank you, YouTube.  
 

Thank You Napkin with Ocram Trophy

My sons and I spent some time at a friends' lovely country house during the last week before school started.

At home, we live in the sort of apartment where I keep my socks on because otherwise it takes me too long to scrub my feet clean in the shower in the morning.   We are usually short on food that a guest might want to eat, but there is petrified food on the floor, our towels are definitely not fluffy and have long threads trailing off of them, and we don't have any extra beds. We have never been very good at extending comfort and hospitality to our guests.

So what sort of token could we give to a family that put us up so graciously?....Yes, I have resorted to drawing on a napkin.

During our visit, when the kids were not forced outside to engage in more commendable activities like swimming and running around in the woods shooting one another with Nerf weapons, they were inside, engaged in a what was reportedly a massive collaborative battle to vanquish one of the big bosses in Terraria, Ocram.

Ocram is large, ugly, ridiculous and not exactly the stuff of polite thank you notes, but he obscures most of my rather less than sparkling portraits of the kids.

The Mouse and Motorcycle Thank You Note

Our younger son has been slogging along in a very demanding tutoring program this summer.  He has done some amazing work and deserves much parental applause... But I know that his accomplishments are due to the unflappable and unflagging support of his tutors.

It takes me five minutes of bartering and bickering to get him to read two lines of a TV program synopsis. But with his tutors, he has been happily reading Beverly Cleary's 1965 book "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" and that is considerably more challenging than cable listings.

It is always impossible to sufficiently thank the people who are endlessly patient with my kids.
When confronted with an unsolvable problem, I often resort to drawing on napkins.

I wanted to add my son into this picture, but did not have the time to pull off a portrait. I was really trying to get at least five hours of sleep last night (The New York Times ran an article recently that said that sustained periods of five hours or less a night result in irrevocable hardening of the arteries....so I am already in big trouble)

I still did not attain the artery saving amount of five hours of sleep...but at least I did not annoy my son by drawing a picture of him.

Sea Otter and Harry Houdini in front of the Brooklyn Bridge

So long Second Grade....
One last image that doesn't make any sense without an explanation:

Our younger son is finishing up the school year tomorrow, and I am further behind than usual in figuring out how to express some small portion of the gratitude we feel towards his teachers and learning specialists.  Since I try to solve far too many problems by drawing on napkins, it is not a surprise that here we have a thank you napkin for his teachers. 

In addition to the class study of the bridge, our son did his independent research projects on Sea Otters, Harry Houdini, and Jacob Lawrence. My apologies to Mr. Lawrence for not including him here. While Mr. Houdini was well known for jumping off bridges while handcuffed and generally submerging himself in water, I could not make any such argument for Mr. Lawrence. Perhaps he would not be sorry to skip being submerged in effigy in a toxic urban waterway.

As it is, both the bridge and Harry look a bit off.  My older son glanced at the napkin yesterday and said, "Whoa! What is going on with his head?!!" When I responded self-defensively that I didn't think it was a terrible likeness, he soothed me, "Ok, it's probably just that I am not used to seeing him in color." Yes, that must have been it.

Harry, sans Sea Otter

Ocean Animals Express Gratitude

An unlikely assortment of sea creatures crammed on one napkin:

It is challenging to come up with holiday gifts for teachers, tutors and therapists.

I am always extremely grateful to those people who are not even biologically related to my kids, but are consistently more supportive and tolerant than I manage to be on a good day.

When an opportunity comes up to be officially grateful to these generous, and most often colossally underpaid people, I always feel like there is not a good solution. At school, there is an official group class gift, and we are not supposed to individually give the teachers anything of momentary value.

One of Ansel's classroom teachers won't be coming back after winter break. While I was packing up the holiday card and gift trinket last night at 8 pm, Ansel told me what he really wanted to give to Elizabeth was a napkin featuring all of the ocean animals that the class had studied.

When I showed him the napkin this morning, he said, "Wow, you got all of them on there, good job!"

Can't say much more than that. 

But, yes, I did manage to get all of them on there.  

Thank You Note

Just to demonstrate that not every napkin is well drawn or, ahem, "culturally relevant."

Ansel just completed an intensive six week tutoring program which was staffed by six unfailingly positive, supportive, professional, and not incidentally as far as my son is concerned, extremely attractive young women. I can barely get Ansel to look at a few flash cards with me without all sorts of pain and suffering and maybe even the shedding of blood. They, however, were able to effect a miraculous transformation in his reading skills.

The question of what sort of token to give these exemplary young women to indicate our appreciation for their hard work was one for which I could not really find a satisfactory answer. 
Thus, among other things, this "Thank You Napkin" happened.  I had to make six prints of it, as there was no way that I was gong to manage to produce six individual napkins. 

Although had I done six napkins, perhaps the practice might have led to one satisfactory portrait of Ansel. As it was, I made my son look a bit like a pasty faced, annoyed old lady (a much more apt description of myself).

But it's bright, isn't it?

Should Have Just Drawn the Dog

We are still in between school and summer camp this week, so I had some time to get myself into other napkin related trouble.

Trying vainly to come up with an appropriate thank you gift for Ansel's soon to be former speech therapist (the very excellent Bethe Halligan of the Speech Playroom).

After years of care that has been far above and far far beyond the call of duty, an appropriate token seemed to exceed my mental and physical resources...so I drew on a napkin.

We've had napkins featuring Bethe's infinitely tolerant dog Harry before: (see one here, or here, or here). This time I felt the unhealthy urge to add my kids to the image.

As the art critic Dave Hickey once said in a catalog essay in which he specifically, ahem, did not appreciate my work (my sculpture, not napkins, god only knows what he would have to say about those): portraiture is always problematic, and nothing is worse than a parent's sentimental portrait of his or her own child.

He was of course probably talking about quality of concept rather than just plain old bad, awkward drawing.

But here we have bad concept and bad drawing.

Maybe I'll take another swing at just the dog...