Here I am in my kitchen on a Friday night working on a drawing for my son's teacher. She was making a bulletin board for school, and needed a larger-than-life drawing of a child. Since it's for a first-grade class, I thought I should make this child look like it could be either a boy or a girl, so that nobody felt left out. In my mind, this is a boy with longer hair that I called "Pat." His teacher actually thought it was a girl, so I guess I was successful in making it androgynous.

I did several small sketches before drawing the "real" sketch onto this 5-foot long sheet of paper that she gave me. After the pencil sketch was done, I traced that with a black marker. The face was the most difficult part to draw, as people are not really something I've had much experience drawing. In college my worst art class was "Illustration," so that's definitely not my strong suit as an artist. So considering this, I was pretty happy with how cute this kid ended up being!

Getting the drawing itself to look right was the hardest part. Once that was done, the fun began and I colored it all in with crayons (not a medium I have much experience using!) I was going to use pastels, but was afraid it would get ruined when I rolled it up and sent it back to school. (unless I used a fixative spray -- which I didn't have,) the pastel chalk would smudge and the colors would all smudge together. I ended up using several different shades of blues for the jeans and reds for the shirt. Crayons aren't super blend-able, but for a school bulletin board project, I think the results were good enough.

Here's "Pat!" Ready to take to school and hang up. I think he/she turned out to be quite adorable if I do say so myself. 🙂 The crayon-therapy was not my first choice for Friday night relaxation, but it ended up being a fun creative outlet after all.

Here's "Pat" hanging up at school. 🙂