Morbid vs. Sappy: Which Wins Out?

I guess I'm just morbid. Either that or I really suffer from a lack of sappitude. I really am a sentimental person in many ways--it's just sappiness that I can't stand. For instance, today on Facebook one of the young people I know posted this message: "Sometimes you love someone so much that not even the truth can change your mind." I'm sure this is meant to fan the flames of young twitterpation, but my immediate thought was, "I wonder if the mothers of serial killers feel that way?" Edward Gorey was one of my favorite artists when I was a child. Does that speak volumes?


(This post is dedicated to Carrie and Andria--you'll both understand...)

Today's Adventures in Art

Today my children and I attended our local comic book store's annual National Free Comic Book Day event. We duly chose some new comics to read, and then eagerly stood in line for free drawings from our local comic book artist guild. My son and I have done this for the last three years, now (if you look in my archive you will see the previous year's drawings). This year

I requested a picture of my favorite comic book character ever: Tintin and Snowy. Okay, so technically that counts as two, but as Matt Nelson (the artist who drew for me) said, how can you have one and not the other? He was quite thrilled to draw those characters because he was expecting most of the people would want Avengers characters (since the movie opened last night; to me the word "Avengers" conjures up John Steed and Emma Peel). He was also impressed that I had brought one of my books as reference material (I always stress the importance of reference material to my students), and was surprised to see it was in French. My first Tintin book was "L'ile de Noire"--the French version of "The Black Isle." My grandmother brought it back from Martinique when I was about five years old, and I couldn't read it until the fourth grade when my mom finally found for me a copy in English. Thanks to our local libraries I have been able to read all but two (the unfinished Alph Art, and the banned Congo). Even better, a young lady in the line next to me also asked for Tintin and Snowy! Tres cool! Thank you, Matt Nelson!


I've been working on some drawing projects of my own this week. While watching some history videos I've kept my hands busy drawing some cards for a school project, but I've neglected to take any photos. What I can share, though, is the other thing I've been drawing, which is a graphic for the Medieval/Renaissance Faire my other school is putting together for June. It needs a bit of tweaking still, then I have to figure out how to turn it into something computer usable when I don't have any fancy programs...

After visiting the comic book store, we went to the library and perused the wares at their semi-annual book sale. I scored a handful of art instruction books on things like collage and self-portraiture. Yesterday one of my students gave me a set of cards with John Singer Sargent watercolors on them for teacher appreciation. Happy art times. :-)