Grade 1, Day 1

First day back at school today for BallFiend.

Same cheesy grin, with a few less teeth compared to this time last year!
Delphi and Woofer (toy dogs) are still required to attend school with BallFiend (though no doubt they will spend the day shoved in the back of his locker.
Sandals look the same but these are actually new ones, a size or two larger.
New learning community with a new teacher (Suzanne). BallFiend has quite a few of the same kids from Bicicletta last year... most importantly Zoe. 
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A freaky-looking levitating cat

BallFiend's muse has inspired him again...

BallFiend has been invited to Zoe's birthday party tomorrow. It's a dress-up party - come as your favourite animal, real or imaginary. BallFiend is planning to go as a black cat (possibly he could be Schrödinger's Cat as this would mean he would be both real and imaginary at the same time). I'm not sure if the choice of costume is because Zoe said she likes kittens or because dressing up as a black cat is pretty much the only thing BallFiend has ever been willing to dress up as. I suspect the latter.

BallFiend's apparent willingness to dress-up was surprising enough, and then I asked him to make a birthday card for Zoe. Usually whenever I ask BallFiend to make a birthday card for someone, he begrudgingly agrees, then proceeds to 'draw' a random mess of scribbles and often all in grey-lead pencil, outright refusing to use any colour.

So I was very surprised when he readily agreed to my suggestion that he make a birthday card. He even started out by drawing something recognisable - a cat. OK, so it's an extremely freaky-looking, levitating cat, with a big, toothy grin and a bellybutton black heart with veins coming out. (It was a bellybutton at first, but then it became a heart, as is the way of six-year-olds).

Left: the back of the card, featuring a scene from Angry Birds (as you can see).
Right: the front of the card - a black cat with the heart and veins clearly shown.
In the sky is a bird (of course!), done in a Picasso-esque style: partly in profile and partly as seen from above. 

And I was even more surprised when BallFiend readily agreed to write inside the card, without his usual stream of complaints about it being too hard and boring... although he did copy most of the words from an old xmas card that he had found inside a book the other day (which is why he has used a double-story letter "a").

The inside of the card.

I now look forward to being surprised a third time tomorrow, when it is time to get ready for the party. Given BallFiend's usual reluctance to dress up, at all, ever, I will be amazed if he does actually agree to dress-up.
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Portrait of Zoe

BallFiend's drawings are almost always very technical, usually they are aerial views of pipes with various marbles or other objects rolling around in them. Or cross-sections of plumbing...

BallFiend's drawing of the bathroom sink in cross-section, done in early-2012.

He almost always draws in pen or texta and usually only uses one colour, occasionally two or three.

So I was amazed to discover this picture whilst going through BallFiend's school bag yesterday afternoon (during the daily check for important school notices):

"Zoe", portrait by BallFiend, 24 October 2012.

He said proudly: "It's a 'self-portrait of Zoe". Zoe is a girl in his prep class and someone who he has become quite friendly with recently.

We showed it to DeepSpice when he got home, and after some discussion, DeepSpice established that this wasn't actually a self-portrait and that BallFiend was in fact the artist. BallFiend assured us he drew it all himself... though I do wonder if he worked on it with Zoe - the eyes and nose are very much in BallFiend's own style, but I've never seen him draw a mouth/teeth, or a Sun, and he's never done sky and grass like that before.

The picture is also interesting because he rarely even does any representative drawings and I reckon I can count on one hand the number of times BallFiend has drawn a representation of a person that he knows!

There was the time he drew Gran, back when he was 3-and-a-half. Then there was this picture he did of "Mum and me":

"Mum and me" by BallFiend, 28 May 2012.

There is also this picture he drew on Mother's Day earlier this year, while we were dining out, but it was just a face, not of anyone in particular:

A face, by BallFiend, 13 May 2012.

These pictures show how he has been focusing on how to represent facial features (it took The Librarian, with her fine art background, to point this out to me!)

It's lovely to see all BallFiend's thinking about how to represent a face come together into a whole drawing. It's also great to see BallFiend developing new friendships. I just hope Zoe doesn't take having a green nose and yellow teeth the wrong way!

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