DRAGON & Pencils

Last Christmas, my mom and dad bought Bob a set of colored art pencils. I had asked them to do this as I really wanted to get Bob back into his artwork. My mother, who is an artist in her own right, picked out a nice set that were a bit wider than the "normal" pencil, thinking they would be easier for Bob to hold in his left hand. She also bought him some professional art sketchbooks.

Since then, Bob has been drawing some incredible stuff. But try as I might, I could not get him to use any other color besides black... I guess he's just a "black and white" artist. And that one black pencil in the set was growing shorter and shorter...

Awhile back, I told my sister about Bob's penchant for using only the black pencil, and how that pencil was diminishing to a nub and she sent Bob this very cool set of Graphic Sketching pencils which contains 12 pencils, each in a different shade of black.

Of course, Bob was thrilled, but my formerly right-handed, now left-handed artist had some problems, at first, holding onto these pencils which are much thinner than the original one. I tried putting those foam "gripper" things on them, but that just seemed to make it worse...

But he tried, and alas, he finally got the hang of using the new thinner pencils. And now, he is drawing in all different shades of gray and black.

A second problem we encountered with the set is that the pencils are arranged, in order from light to dark, in a slim metal case, and each time Bob (who can only use one hand) tried to select a pencil--he ended up knocking the whole thing on the floor. And there I would be scooping up pencils and arranging them back in order. I finally put them all in a box.

The pencils themselves have numbers on them, but Bob either could not figure out what the numbers meant or just couldn't read them. Heck, I had trouble reading them because the numbers are really small. Bob insisted he wanted those pencils back in order "light to dark". So, I put on my "thinking cap" and came up with this solution:

using a thick rubber band to hold the pencils in place, which I thought was pretty clever--if I don't say so myself.


But enough about the pencils, what about this "Dragon" in the title of this post? Well, here it is. Bob's new drawing (and the first one using the new pencils) which he calls "Dragon":

DRAGON
by
Bob
(click to enlarge)

And, I think it's pretty darn cool!