This morning I browsed the Austin Public Library’s fantastic zine collection (highlights: Nathaniel Russell’s Fliers and Jillian Barthold’s Scenes From Big Bend) and this afternoon the 5-year-old and I made a zine using Bruno Munari’s Plus and Minus transparencies that I picked up in Milan last year and lines from the APL’s events flier. Pretty fun day.
I suggested to the 5-year-old that he record his mom a song for Mother’s Day and this is the jam he came up with.
A headline sums it all up: “Spaniard raised by wolves disappointed with human life.”
(Above: drawing of Humpty Dumpty by Owen, age 5)
Some of the kids’ drawings fall into the “I don’t want to recycle this, but I can’t see keeping it in a folder,” and those often get pasted into my notebook. Funny thing is, I have a hunch that these collaged scraps will mean more to me in the future than some perfect, saved drawing. (“Oh, this is when J was into drawing Kraftwerk and O was into playing waiter…”)
Sometimes when the 5-year-old is being really annoying I’ll draw a comic of him to snap him out of it. Then sometimes he’ll ask to draw, too:
I often draw his one-liners as a little single panel comic in my diary:
Sometimes our conversations warrant multiple panels:
Some mornings he will hover over my diary and ask to read all of them. As Camus said, “One has to pass the time somehow…”
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