Youthful Helpers

Biking through Ladd's Addition after work tonight, I pulled over because I heard the sound of banjos from the center of the grassy circle. Sure enough, the weather is nice enough for the tradition of the Wednesday night bluegrass jam session to be back in action--I counted about 12 musicians with either fiddles, banjos, or guitars playing and singing together.

My first instinct was to sketch the musicians, but the nearby boy holding his poodle's leash immediately struck up a conversation once I busted out the watercolor kit, so I went ahead and decided it was time to tackle Item Number 10: Dog and its Owner. (The poodle got some wonderful back-scratching from my sweetie while she posed.)

The sketch is somewhat peculiar, largely because more and more kids got interested in what I was doing as the work progressed. The adorable crawling baby was handily (and repeatedly) intercepted before she got into the paints, but a nearby adorable toddler and the older sister of the boy with the poodle were eager to either give advice, or grab a brush and help paint! I quickly wrapped this sketch up and flipped to a "sacrificial" page of the sketchbook so I could let the kids have a turn--which happened to be an incomplete sketch of a Benson Bubbler (Scavenger Hunt Item #18).

The pen work had been abandoned because I was drawing while waiting for the bus, and voila! The bus came! (Funny how that works.) So it was really generous of the kids to help me finish the piece. The 9-ish girl was choosing colors carefully and placing them very deliberately in order to flesh out the shape of the fountain and show the water squirting out, while the 2-ish toddler used my mop brush to swirl all the paint around on the page like mad. I really adore how it looks. So dynamic! Hooray for collaborative artworks.