Sketching Fun

One of the books I've been enjoying this summer is a "how-to" book on creating simple drawings, reminiscent in style of 1950's magazine illustrations...

The book is called: 50 Ways to Draw Your Beautiful Ordinary Life.

There are 50 simple drawing "lessons"...

The first is how to draw a cup and saucer...

Fun!

After practicing, I wanted to pull out all my cups and saucers and draw each one...

The second lesson is on drawing buildings...

After copying the house in the book, I pulled out a photograph of the two-room "teacherage" my mother and I lived in in Kingman, Alberta, the first year she taught home economics and I was in grade 1.

The backstory to that: My mother wanted to teach home economics, which wasn't taught in our village school, but it was going to be taught in a new high school in a neighboring village.

We only had one vehicle and my mother didn't yet have her driver's license. So every Sunday evening my father and brother drove us 25 miles from Hay Lakes, the village where we lived, where my father owned a garage, to the neighboring village of Kingman. In those days, it was unthinkable to drive that distance to go to work every day!

The school provided my mother with this little house to live in. Every Friday evening, my father would come and pick us up. During the week my two-year-old brother was cared for by my father's mother, who, at the time, lived with us...

That living arrangement lasted only one school year. The following summer my father sold his garage and we moved 100 miles south to the city of Red Deer, where we all lived together again - all, except my grandmother, who stayed in Hay Lakes where she got a job caring for a handicapped child, the daughter of the village blacksmith. I don't know how long she stayed in Hay Lakes before moving to Edmonton, where she eventually lived with her other son, my father's half-brother Walter and his family.

My mother once commented that she doesn't know why she took me away from my friends to live in Kingman for my first year of school.

Because you didn't want to be lonely, I replied...

I should add that our house in Red Deer was our first to have indoor water and plumbing! In both Hay Lakes and Kingman, water was hand-pumped from a well - and our toilets were in outhouses! I really don't remember if our school in Kingman had indoor plumbing or outhouses as well.

I mentioned this once when I was teaching a class of immigrants and they were shocked... No indoor plumbing in Canada?!! In their countries of origin, yes... But in Canada - they couldn't imagine it!

After drawing this little dwelling, I thought it might be interesting to do a sketch of every house I've ever lived in... if I can find photos of them all...