Day 13

I love to draw, but I'm not good at it.  Or maybe I should say that I am not good at coming up with my own drawings, from my own imagination, so I tend to draw things I'm looking at (not trace mind you, just look at whatever and draw it freehand).  I first realized I enjoyed doing this when I had to draw a tree outside our class window for school once upon a time.  Again, I'm not great at it, but I enjoy doing it.

For today's craft I decided to draw the Artist Zombie from the book "How to Draw Killer Zombies".  He has a step by step way of doing it, but I suck at that whole process, and he says to use tracing paper, stencils, etc...and I don't have all that.  So I grabbed the book, a sheet of white copy paper and my trusty #2 pencil and set to work.  The image on the top is my drawing and the image on the bottom is the picture in the book that I looked at while doing my drawing.

Because it was in pencil, and I scanned it, it's hard to see, but I made it bigger in the hope you can see it!

Day 8

Today's craft was tricky!  I chose it because I really thought it was going to be simple and quick.  I have tons of books around the house and most of them I will never pick up again, so I had purchased a book on how to do crafts with old books (lots of irony there, huh?!).  One of the crafts was to make mats using rolled book pages, white glue and bobby pins.  I decided to make a drink coaster. 

The hardest part was rolling the pages!  Tricky little things.  I don't know why I had such a problem with it, I guess maybe the way the book paper was, I'm not sure, but each roll ended up being a bit different size then the last, and they were all supposed to be "uniform".  The book suggested using a "rolling tool, such as a dowel", but all I had was a BBQ skewer, so that's what I used.  It wasn't much help!  After I rolled each page, I used white glue along the edge, held it, got glued to the paper, got unstuck, got glued to the table mat, got unstuck, got restuck to the paper, swore, shook off paper and started on the next roll.  I did this 20 times as per the instructions.  After letting the glue dry, and attaching the rolls side by side with bobby pins, I realized I only needed 14 rolled pages, so I got stuck on paper/mat/paper 6 more times then was neccessary.  I swore again. 

After all that, I was pretty happy with the outcome.  Upon showing Stan, he tried to blow into the ends, saying it looked like a pan flute.  I then showed my mom, who was in a different part of the house and had no idea what Stan said.  She proceeded to try to blow into the ends, saying it looked like a pan flute.  I then showed our dog Izzy, who proceeded to try to eat it.

No one knows good coaster art when they see it!