50 Years And Nothing Has Changed

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I mentioned in this post from a few weeks back that I'd noticed a sort of peace sign in the sidewalk cracks while out walking. At the time, I failed to get a photo, so I went back for one a few days later.

Along the way, I noticed a few more peace signs so I started taking pictures of those, too.

Not a crack, but the right arrangement of straight lines to meet my requirements

I don't know what people thought as they drove by, while I seemingly took pictures of my feet.

We suffer for our art, do we not?

Anyhow, the peace signs were not really complete because they had no circles surrounding the lines.

So my next thought was that, by Jove, I'd learn to use Paint to draw the circles on my photos. Usually I try to avoid voluntarily learning new technology, but I really wanted to do this, so I called an emergency meeting of my two brain cells and figured it out.

While looking for peace signs in the sidewalks, I had also started noticing patterns in the cracks in the streets as well, and found one that reminded me of the "Kilroy was here" pictures that we used to doodle on our binder covers in high school.

So then I used Paint to fill in the details of that sketch.

What on earth is going on with that nose?

Refined the details after researching Kilroy on Wikipedia

And THEN I noticed a place in the sidewalk that had a lot of random cracks in it that reminded me of one of the kinds of "art" our elementary teacher had us do. She called it a "Scribble Picture" and it's just like it sounds. You scribble randomly around the page, and then you fill in the various shapes formed by the lines with different colours.

Here is my inspiration piece from my little art book that I wrote about in this post:

Please remember I did this somewhere between age 5 and 8. You were expecting Monet?

And here is the sidewalk "scribble picture" without colouring:

And this was where things started to go off the rails. I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to use the "fill" option in Paint to fill in those shapes. However, I'm a persistent donkey and I chose the "marker" option and began, laboriously, to colour in my sidewalk scribble picture using the mouse.

(No, I am not five years old. Or even ten. But I'm stubborn. And have too much time on my hands now and then.)

Now, I was not a good colourer in school. I could never do it neatly, nor consistently, nor within the lines. I couldn't see the point of it, I didn't enjoy doing it, and I was terrible at it.

Apparently nothing has changed in fifty years. Computer colouring is every bit as horrible and crazy-making as crayon colouring.

By the time I had that sucker finished, there was a cramp in my mousing hand, my left eye had started to twitch, my shoulders were somewhere north of my ears, and I had to resist a serious urge to fling both the mouse and the computer screen across the room.

But having done all that work, I couldn't NOT post the result here.

Donkey gets a D grade in colouring, and an E for effort. I think those are two different marking schemes, but whatever.

I think I actually prefer the one I did in elementary school.



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Here is a link if you're interested in the background of the peace sign. Did you know, for instance, that it's based on the semaphore (flag signals) for the letters N and D - which stand for Nuclear Disarmament ... I had no idea before the article in that link popped up in my email.

And here's a link to a Wikipedia article on Kilroy -- who seems to be known as Foo in Australia and Mr. Chad (or Chad) in the United Kingdom.

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Peace out, people. And if you know how to use the "fill" option in Paint, for a photograph, I'm all ears. As donkeys tend to be.

Donkey ears courtesy of Pixabay, my favourite donkey supplier.