Wee Laura’s Wonders

This week’s Life Book lesson was taken by Violette Clark.  Her earlier lesson had been about creating a whimsical, dream cottage which led me to create a fun collage of a magical, quirky house.  The thrust of the lesson was to work in a cartooning style and storyboard happy childhood memories.

My childhood was not always easy and I experienced challenges and obstacles to be overcome but nevertheless I could generate a very long list of happy childhood memories.  The trick for me was to whittle down my options.  I started by getting rid of anything that was going to be too difficult to depict in a simple drawing but then I decided to focus on memories of things I did more than once, the happy things that were routine for me.  The idea was to use ink and watercolour but my schedule has been mashed this week so I ended up adding the colour while watching a movie with the Pictlings.  Consequently, instead of watercolour I used coloured pencils.  I am not adept at all at using coloured pencils (it’s on my list of skills I need to improve) but it seemed quite apt to do some simple colouring in given I was illustrating my childhood.

I drew my little vignettes around a central cartoon version of wee me.  The title banner beneath looks brown in the photo but it is actually gold.  The fun times with my Grandad might need some explanation: there’s eating ice cream, representing all the sweet treats he used to give us, collecting eggs from a farm, and stomping fruit for my Grandad to turn into wine.  Then there are depictions of me reading and drawing, both activities that I did voraciously and still love.  I loved to climb trees but am also afraid of heights so I had some favourite trees that had great trunks and branches for climbing and scaling along without being too far off the ground.  Another outdoor activity I loved was hunting for insects, bugs and beasties, lifting up rocks, turning over slabs, peeking under pieces of wood, on an insect safari.  Finally there is a drawing to illustrate me playing detective, solving crimes committed by and against my cuddly toys.  I was an early reader of Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes stories so I liked to set up little mysteries with clues to be solved.  I didn’t actually use any sharp knives – that was just for the drawing – but what I actually used were corn cob skewers as perfect wee weapons.

So those are a few of my happy childhood memories.  Maybe you could have a think about what memories you would choose.