Owen=Artist

Every child has his or her own special "thing." Strength, talent, character trait...whatever it is. Since he was very young, Owen has shown an interesting aptitude for drawing. He has these super-stylized , comic-book characters. For a long time I wondered if these characters were people, but he assured me that they are aliens. (When the kindergarten teacher asked him to draw a person, it looked like a person.) He prefers to draw in frames. We have files on our computer that are called "Owen Grid" and "Owen Grid 2" so we can print off endless copies of his drawing frames in a couple different sizes. Every once in a while, we staple together a stack of his pages and add a book to his collection.

These are a couple of my personal favorites from this week. The first guy looks like an evil teddy bear. The second looks like Randolf from Monsters, Inc. (Owen explained that he was walking away from the viewer, turning back to snarl over his shouder!) Although these two are less eye-catching, they had to be included here because they are part of a dynasty...the Dynasty of Wonder Owl. In a drawing session with his dad, Owen created the character Wonder Owl and some villians to accompany him. He draws these characters over and over! I wonder if anyone sees the Ed Emberley inspiration? Mark and I both had copies of his drawing books...Mark had originals that he had pored over as a kid and I had copies that I purchased when I first started teaching because I remembered them so fondly. Now they belong to Owen. It's the perfect style for him.

So much of our daily life is consumed with kids being ordered around or yelled at, but when I can take a minute to single out something really special about one of my kids...well, there's plenty of reason to be proud. Look for upcoming entries about the girls!