Color Magic

Kamryn asked me the other day, "Grandma, are you an artist?"  I guess she had been at Edna's and asked her who painted the big painting hanging on her wall, and was impressed in a way only a small grandchild can be impressed when she found out it was me.  Before I could reply, she went on to say, "because I think you are."

Am I an artist?  No.  I don't think of myself as an artist.  An artist earns money from his work, or at least produces pieces of art that are professional in quality.  Me?  I'm just a person who loves to color and draw and take pictures and paint and create and put together crafts and homemade cards and scrapbook pages and sketch and cut out and stamp and dabble and write and compose and embroider and sew and do.   I'm not an artist.  I am a creator.

One of the things I have forever loved to do is color.  Catch me in a moment when I'm not trying to get food to the table or clean up afterwards, and I'll sit down and color with you.  Give me a box of crayons or colored pencils and a coloring book and I'm a perfectly happy person.  60 years old and I still enjoy coloring like I did when I was five.

Grandma Hansen had a big tub of crayons - only she called them paints - she kept at her house.  Mostly broken bits and pieces with a waxy smell, she would pull down and leave me to my own entertainment while she puttered around that dark, busy basement home where they lived on Falls Ave.  I remember how much I loved that there were so many crayons.   We had crayons at our house, too, but hers had a magic that ours seemed to have lost.

I wonder, do my crayons have a magic at my house, now?  For the grandchildren?  Is that why, when they come to visit, they go to the closet and pull them out even before their coats slip off their shoulders?

I confess I have a guilty pleasure, however, that I am not sharing directly with my grandkids.  (Shhh - don't want to hurt their feelings on this, it's just that some things we get to keep for ourselves).  I heard about a coloring book that Costco was selling around Christmastime.  Not an ordinary big black outlined simple characters of princesses and monsters kind of book.  No, this one was a creation of elaborate beautiful drawings designed to be colored not by a toddler just learning to hold a crayon, but by someone with a touch more experience.   I know Heather shares my love for coloring so I thought this would be a perfect gift for her, but when I saw it, I knew, absolutely without question, knew I had to have one of these for myself as well.

Every page has a magical animal in it - from A to Z.  And I am loving this old hobby made new again for me!   Anytime a page takes about 5 hrs to color (or more) you know it's not an ordinary coloring book.  I'm all the way up to "C":

C is for Camel, in progress

(Can you guess what the second assignment of the first photography lesson was?)