Up until the day before I was under the impression that we'd be showing the kids how to use the tablet and software, maybe walking them through colouring one of the built in pictures (yes, uDraw has a built in colouring book mode - something that proved extremely popular at the event). I was wrong though; while most of the volunteers did do exactly this, myself and another Volition artist (Jose) were to be doing a live demo of the software.
This would prove trickier to myself than Jose I think as he is employed as a 2D artist and has years of experience painting family friendly work without reference - he used to do those airbrushed t-shirts and (legal) graffiti murals. Anyway, this raised the stakes, and my heart rate, a bit.
I would not be able to attend the whole thing, and nor could Jose - He had to leave at 7, and I couldn't be there until then for the second session, so we'd be flying solo for an hour in the evening. The afternoon demo we would take it in turns for though.
When I arrived (a few minutes late due to heavy snowfall the evening before) Jose was already painting an impressive beach scene and putting me to shame. I wasn't too depressed by this, as I said this is Jose's day job too. I won't be posting Jose's work, impressive as it is, because it's his work :) If he puts it on line I'll come back and link to it.
Before we move on to showing my pieces I want to introduce you to the volunteers. I took photos of everyone (bar one) at the event, but they were pretty unflattering. So, given the subject of the blog in general I decided to draw them - And this resulted in even more unflattering images. Regardless, here they are:
If I was smart these would have been done in uDraw too, but they aren't; I wanted to try out my new white Gel pen, so they're all done on paper. Quite small too. Anyway, sorry for the terrible pictures guys (if you're reading). I won't name them all specifically - best to maintain privacy, and no-ones likely to identify them from my poor sketches anyway :) One of those is not from a photo at the event though, and I think it's probably also the worst one - but this isn't about my poor illustrative skills, this is about the event!
Jose finished his Beach Scene and then it was my turn. Unlike Jose I need some form of reference to work from, and the only this handy was a photo of a little boy at his computer (we were place in such an area that it was easy for folks to see us, but we couldn't see anything really except the screen). This photo was small, about 3 feet above my right shoulder, and reflecting the overhead lights. This really isn't a very good excuse for the result, but it was what I was working from regardless:
OK, maybe it's not that bad, but it's a long way from good, and that Joker smile is just plain embarrassing.
While I was painting a nice girl from Eastern Europe came over to chat - she was from the local University doing a study (I can't remember of what) and had some questions. She'd spoken to my wife, who was at the museum with my Son at the time, and this naturally ended up with her watching the painting. This was a good test, as at that time of day the museum was fairly quiet and not many people were around to see our demonstration. I consider the afternoon session a warm up for the main event.
After the Jr. Joker I had a few minutes and sketched out this pretty poor dragon before time ran out. I'm only posting this here because the promise of the blog is you get to see the best and worst regardless of how embarrassing they may be. This one is pretty embarrassing.
And that was the end of the session. I went upstairs to see how the rest of the gang was doing and they'd had it almost as quiet as we had downstairs. I guess one or two children had come up to have a go, but mostly they'd just been drawing Christmas Trees and Ogres - I think some of their stuff was better than what I'd been doing in public downstairs. Anyway, that was that, and so we broke until later - in my case 7PM.
When I returned I was somewhat stunned by the queue outside the museum. In addition to us the museum was also throwing a "Snow Globe" which is a sort of indoor winter activities thing in the main auditorium. The area this is in is pretty big, and it's not heated. I had expected it to be popular, but the level of popularity was far beyond my expectations. My heart rate went up a little more because to get to the Snow Globe this vast line had to go directly past where we were doing the live demo. Eeek! hundreds of people get to see my suck in person! Terrifying.
It took a few minutes to get past the crowd to where we were doing the demo, and following a bit of good thinking from Deb I grabbed some cuddly toys on the way for reference (It's children's museum, there are cuddly toys 'k?). This time Jose was painting an elephant (He did 5 pictures to my 3 - Beach Scene, Shark, Graffiti name, snowboarder, elephant... I think the snow boarder was to show off the colouring book feature though). I pointed out that between the crowd and the weather he should get moving to make his appointment, but he decided to finish the elephant, which looked great. Then it was my turn.
So, picture the scene - I'm in a side corridor (more spacious than it sounds) with a queue of people filing in from outside directly past my back and through a set of doors to my left. Past the doors is the unheated auditorium, and the through draft from outside to the Snow Globe was freezing (Seriously, I was so cold I started to lose feeling in my fingers toward the end). I'm sitting with my back to the line, so I can't see what's going on back there, and I'm painting a display of cuddly toys on a TV screen about 10 feet away. Children regularly wander in and out of the way of the TV (they want a better look at what I'm doing, but of course I can't do anything with their head in the way :)), and one little girl keeps trying to pilfer the toys in the display I'm painting. None of this is condusive to painting a good picture... And then the drums started. They were having a demonstration of African drums on the other side of the wall I was seated next to.
If you think that sounds terrible and dreadful and I clearly hated it you'd be wrong, it was a blast! The results weren't what you'd call good due to the distractions (well, you might call it good, but I don't), but it was a lot of fun trying to do it. Also, thankfully, Elizabeth had come down from upstairs to talk to interested people and sell Raffle Tickets. She was my hero that night as it meant I could focus on the painting despite the distractions. She also occasionally moved the children out of the way so I could see what I was doing. I was, quite frankly, terrified, but I still had a lot of fun. Over the course of the hour I painted this:
Which is kinda cute right?
After that we hung about for an extra hour or so as the display upstairs was so popular (I think someone mentioned that they ran out of ink for the printer due to printing out the pictures the kids had done to take home). Myself and Elizabeth stayed more or less by the uDraw and Wii downstairs so people could try it out there as well. Finally it was time to go home, and I got a lift from Laural (Thanks Laural!) as my wife had taken my son home to bed a few hours before.
All in all it was an exciting day (I didn't mention the holiday parade I saw with my son between the two sessions, but there was one, and it added to the Christmas spirit brought on by the event and the snow), and lots of people seemed impressed by the pictures I was doing even if I wasn't particularly happy with them. More importantly they had a great time at the museum, and some of them spoke of getting a uDraw for their kids for Christmas ("Where do we get them from?" and so forth).
No more uDraw posts for a while though, if for no other reason than I'm running out of eye-rolling titles for the posts.
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