Alice and Charles have become heavily involved in drawing.
Alice used to just suck on the pens but over time she has come to appreciate the use of them on paper instead of herself. She has also switch from tentative, weak strokes to bold, expressive ones as you can see in this video. The final result looks like this:
Charles is much in to drawing these days as well. He’s actually rather particular about his work — I’ve seen him several times throwing out his own drawings because “it not work out right”. Here is an example of efforts that did pan out:
Traffic Lights and RailRoads
I then introduced Charles to yard wide Post-Its™ which was a major thrill for him1. He spent a lot of time making some large drawings to take full advantage of his expanded workspace. I made the mistake of putting up on the wall a couple of pages that Mom had left on the pad and now Charles wants all of his artwork up on the wall as well.
Charles is also starting to experiment with digital art. As noted previously, I’ve been printing signs for Charles, which I’ve drawn based on vague descriptions from Charles (“I want an EXIT sign”). The most recent time, however, Charles wanted something special and helped me with detailed specifications to build this image:
I made him do a rough sketch on paper first after which I duplicated the sketch on the computer. Charles then directed such things as the selection of the texture, and the size and location of the traffic lights (and their color order). I think he was happy with the result, as he was literally bouncing up and down in front of the printer while it chugged along.
1 Getting worked up over a new type of paper? Maybe he really is my boy after all.