Artiste

For reasons unknown to me, I have become the Artist in Residence at school over the past month. There are several open slots in my schedule most days, and I decided not to fill them in with any classes just to give myself time to work on all of my projects. 

My first one wasn't any great shakes, just a bunch of tiny figures to decorate the edges of the bulletin board for the preschool class: 

But apparently that was enough to get the ball rolling. I'm still very uncomfortable drawing something from scratch, but I'm getting fairly accomplished as an expander- taking a small picture and sketching it to take up a full page. 

The kindergarten teacher has me do a lot for her (she also randomly ambushes me with leftover breakfast, but that's another tale for another time). My biggest project thus far involved making full page color illustrations of domestic animals (which in India are mostly variations on cattle) and wild animals. For some reason I was really taken with my cow:

My fanciest project to date is my most recent. The house mother for Boys Home is also a teacher at the school, and asked me for the national symbols of India to put on the walls at th Home: the national bird (peacock), the national flower (lotus), the national tree (banyan tree), and the national animal (tiger). I think the banyan tree came out horribly, but she seemed to like it. The tiger is pretty nice (the head is wrong, but oh well), and the peacock is my pride and joy.