Intergenerational Drawing

Dear Sarah - Day 99 of our daily drawing exchange

April 9, 2025
Hi Nikki,

Kianna and I went to her favourite cafe for tea and a croissant after school today. We used the LED drawing pads to do portraits of each other, then we drew the red carnations that were on the table. The LED pads are a "ride or die" drawing tool-- there's no going back once you've drawn something. The erase button erases the whole thing. Kianna really liked the idea of single line drawings, so that's what we did. She perfected the technique of using as little pressure as possible on the stylus in order to cross a space without making much of a mark. I love my Nana crown! I also love going from the close work of painting the magnolia to the looseness of drawing with Kianna. Lots more laughter with the latter! And more croissant crumbs.

Hope you saw the timeline I shared with you. What a mind-bender that was!! It will be useful though.

See you tomorrow afternoon (2/3).

XO S

Hi Sarah -

Oh, the Nana crown! What a delight!

I did see the timeline, though not in any detail… will try to find a few minutes to study/wrap my head around what you have done before we meet tomorrow. THANK YOU!!

Today, amongst other things, I was wrapping my head around getting our taxes in… Yuck. Among my least favourite things to do on the planet.

This drawing was done on the iPad very loosely following a very contrasty old black and white photo of me and my father walking along a long, hot, dusty, lonely road in Australia. No idea where we were, but he was wearing his usual long, dark trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt with a collar (sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow). I was thinking of using something like this as one of my pieces of art for the Camino project Dani and I have been working on for school. There’s a section where I talk about how I learned to be a walker from Dad and the long walks he loved to go on. My strongest impressions of him from those early days was how tall he was (in fact, he was not a tall man and shrank with age until we were very close in height - and I am only 5’1”). Looking at the old photo, my stubby little legs did not extend as far as his knees, so I understand why I had the impression I had to trot to keep up with him.

One of several threads that runs through our piece of writing is that of how difficult it is to draw hands and how it’s easier to either leave them out or only have a suggestion of what’s supposed to be at the ends of our arms. I’ve deliberately left the hands sort of unfinished. We do look a bit like we are wearing matching helmets - I think I’ll fiddle with that a bit…

For now, though - g’night!
Nikki