A Successful Invasion

On Saturday it was take your child to the library day. And as part of Portland Library’s Alien Invasion, I took one of my paintings and helped the teens paint it on a 9x12 stretched canvas. I had practiced this once with a niece over zoom at Thanksgiving and again Friday afternoon last week with a couple of my kids in person. When I practiced it with my kids on Friday, it took 2 hours.

On Saturday, at 1 hour and 15 minutes, the kids had the background done and a disembodied alien head and alien arms on their paintings. I was getting worried that they wouldn’t finish on time. The librarian and I were trying to figure out ways we could send paint home with them. The kids no doubt heard us talking and painted faster. The details went faster and whew, we made it. Next time, I need to remember to bring lots of condiment cups just incase.

My Color by Value drawings have been a huge success. The Librarians tell me that they have a group of die hards who come in and go directly to the desk and ask to color a tile for the bulletin board. I estimated that there are probably 33 tiles left to color and there are still 4 weeks left of the program. They couldn’t tell me how many people have been participating in the tile coloring program because not everyone wants to be part of their reading program, but they do come in to color a tile.

There are only 149 tiles. I pre-seeded the installation by coloring 4 or 5 tiles, so, they will have 144 times someone has come in to color a tile. For our little library in our little town, that is a success. Here is what the drawings looked like on Feb 5th 2022: