“Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.”
Today is the epitome of a perfect fall day. The sun is shining with that sharp glint it seems to have only in the fall and winter. The temperature is in the mid 50’s. A small breeze is blowing. Some trees still have color, but others have brown leaves clinging ever so slightly. The last of my flowers are still in bloom. The rest of the garden is filled with brown stalks. Soon they too will be gone as it is close to clearing the garden time. The deck is still open but I’ve called Skip to come and cover the furniture and the umbrellas and stow away the candles and decorations which made the deck so inviting last summer. I think when winter comes I miss the deck most of all.
When I was in elementary school, in the lower grades, art was mostly cutting and coloring. I remember coloring leaves. On a single piece of paper, there were a few outlines of leaf shapes each with a vein down the middle. We’d color them with our crayons then cut them out using those little scissors which always seemed to get stuck on my fingers. The leaves were yellow or red as all the real leaves were. After we’d cut them out, we’d paste them on construction paper to make a collage. I remember the paste seemed to get on everything, including my fingers. We used a round bottle of paste which had a brush attached to the top. I could never get just the right amount of paste on the leaves. Sometimes the leaves stuck to my fingers and when I pulled them off, the leaves stuck to my other fingers. My collage took a long time to finish, and sometimes the back of the paper was wet from the paste leaking through. I’d wave it in the air hoping it would dry. I always put it between books when I was going home or it would curl.
My mother made a big deal of my art work. I beamed.
Explore posts in the same categories: MusingsTags: art, blooming flowers, clearing the garden, closing the deck, coloring leaves, dead stalks, fall day, sunny
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October 26, 2015 at 2:30 pm
Frost here this morning but the clouds arrived just after I came to work and I think they stayed all day long. Nice anf´d warm though and no more frost this week at least 🙂
It was still too early to start the Christmas paintings and decorating making so I thinknwe still glued real lefas on to paper this time of year. We had two kinds of glue, one see through glue that smelled bad and one that was safe to use for the glue eaters 🙂 The one safe to eat smelled very nice and was white, it is still used today and called Björnklister (Bear glue). I’ve never really understood those children who used to eat the glue 🙂 🙂 So I could use the “real” kind.
Like You I always used too much and everything close enough stuck to the paper and sort of became a part of the painting 🙂
Have a great day!
Christer.
October 26, 2015 at 5:53 pm
Christer,
We haven’t had frost here yet but I think they have had it up north.
We would have Thanksgiving in between so it was turkey and Pilgrim coloring. We had to write about what we would give thanks for. Our parents were always the perfect choice.
I never saw a glue eater. Maybe they did it in the privacy of their homes. I only remember that one kind of glue when I was young.
Yup, you and I were not the best at gluing to paper.
Have a great evening!
October 26, 2015 at 6:18 pm
Christer,
The TV weatherman just said the Cape is the only part of the state which hasn’t yet had a frost.
October 26, 2015 at 2:30 pm
One of my favorite authors, Leo Buscalia, once described elementary school art class as the teacher asking the children to draw a tree on manila paper. One kid has climbed a tree and played in a tree so he takes the big 48 box of crayons and covers the paper with browns and greens and orange colors. When he brings it to the teacher she says, that’s nice but it’s not a tree. What she really is telling the kid is to draw my tree. He then sits down and draws a line about a third of the way up across the page and colors below it green. He draws a brown stick up from the line with a green cloud stuck on the top and colors the top third of the paper blue with a yellow sun. He turns it in and gets his M&M. The kid gets the message. Creativity begins to be killed. Thus as Margret Mitchell once said we pass on the old ideas and prejudices from one generation to the next by degrees. Bachelor, Masters and PhDs. 🙂
After this rainy weekend the sun is shinning and the temperature is in the 60s. Our leaves won’t start to turn until the middle of next month.
October 26, 2015 at 6:17 pm
Bob,
I don’t remember being given specifics if we had free drawing. It was whatever came into our heads.
Each generation finds its own prejudices, its own stuff to hate. Some are righteous, many are not.
We’ll have cold and then rain and wind Wednesday, a remnant of Patricia.
October 26, 2015 at 6:32 pm
I don’t remember that happening either, but I remember Buscalia’s example. I think it’s an analogy for don’t let the education system define or crush your creativity. Early on we all learn to please the authority figure in front of us. Some of us became hippies in the late 60s while others marched off to Vietnam Nam. 🙂
October 26, 2015 at 6:36 pm
Bob,
I think many of us began to question authority when it expected blind obedience and when we realized that the powers that be discriminated and called it legal.
We were the first generation to question authority, and I think that has become the norm, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad.
October 26, 2015 at 10:15 pm
Hi Kat,
I’m so glad you told Christer when we change the clocks. I was reading his blog and realized I hadn’t heard when ours were supposed to go back.
We used the white paste glue. It came in a gallon sized plastic jar. The teacher would cut math paper into 2×2 inch squares and, using a big popsicle stick, she’d dip out globs of white glue and place one glob on each piece of math paper. We’d file up and get our glob of glue and bring it back to our desks to do our projects. Yes, some kids did eat the stuff. It smelled bad to me so no way was I eating it.
I don’t remember coloring leaves. We did the wax paper thing with them. We glued leaves on to things.
We also did that thing where you used up all your crayons coloring blocks of different colors onto white paper. Then you used up several black crayons coloring over the blocks and then you took a pin or sharp pencil and scratched off the black in leaf shapes that were already colored. That was fun. Lots of black wax fragments all over the place.
It was a lovely day up here. I saw some of it. The rest I spent with an online course. I failed the module test so I had to do it all over again. Second time’s the charm. 🙂
Enjoy the evening.
October 26, 2015 at 10:48 pm
Hi Caryn,
I think it a bit early, but I guess not.
We had to buy many of our materials as the school didn’t supply them. Crayons and glue were two of them. I like having my own paste jar.
We didn’t have an iron in school to do the leaves and wax paper, but we did it at home. I always thought the leave looked really cool all covered in wax.
I remember doing the same thing but we used paint. We’d scratch a picture on the black and all the colors would come through. It was like a rainbow picture.
I did some errands including my blood test. Tomorrow I’m actually going to bring my laundry out of the cellar to upstairs. I’m feeling so much better.
Have a wonderful evening!