The Force Has Been Disconnected....

I'm gonna let you all in on a little secret.  If I am asked to do something my response is always the same...sure no problem!  Need a house built, sure no problem.  Need an ice sculpture, sure no problem.    Need a mural painted, sure no problem.  Now here's the secret part.  I have no business doing these things because I have never in my life attempted them before, but I seem to have this disease where I think, "how hard can it be?"  I have gotten myself into this situation so many times that my husband finds it highly entertaining.  The first time he learned of this disease was when we were first married and my church needed a teacher for a candy making class for an activity we were having.  What was my response......you guessed it.  Had I ever made candy before?  Nope.  When I was standing in the kitchen crying an hour before I was supposed to teach this class not having any success with my test batch my husband asked why I was teaching a class when I didn't know what I was doing?  Because, I said,  I thought, how hard could it be?  Well, hard enough that a teacher was required for teaching this class.  This is the first time my husband found my cocky can do attitude entertaining.  

So, here we are almost 2 decades later and our cub scout troop was having a blue and gold banquet.  I forgot to attend the meeting where we planned the activity, so what did I get stuck doing?  The decorations.  Oh boy!  Well, I had been to an Enchantment Under the Sea party my friend had the week before where she had all this seaweed.  While standing under the seaweed at her house her and I came up with a plan to reuse it so that I at least had some sort of decoration.  The theme had already been selected so I knew just how to use the seaweed.  The swamp scene of course!   Now what to do to put it into context.  I needed a mural of some sort and an x-wing so the seaweed made sense.  Make a mural?  No problem!  HA!

 Luckily I started the project a week before the event.  I had my husband set up the projector so that I could just outline the characters and it would be easy peasy from there.....  Excuse me while I try and get my laughter under control.......So here's the thing about projectors.  Detail work is not your friend.  The closer you are standing to the image the more pixilated it becomes and you have no idea what you are tracing anymore.  If there is one other thing that I am, it's committed.  This mural was not going to beat me.  Next idea was to just go with a more water color look. So I picked up my paints and just started going at it, trying to channel a mad artist...or the force...or some semblance of talent....anything.  I got to the picture with the creepy outlined eyes and had to walk away.  There was no hiding it now.  I was in serious trouble and could not figure out how to get out of it.

I decided to move on to my x-wing project.  That surely had to be much easier.  No serious artistic abilities involved in that, right?  Oh man I just crack myself up sometimes.  I got the design off of someones blog who had terrible directions so I got the jest of it and then was on my own.  It was a several day undertaking of cardboard cutting and engineering skills and 6 bottles of spray paint, a finger with carpal tunnel syndrome from said 6 cans, drying time, assembling time, more engineering, kicking my husband out of his side of the garage for 2 days.....you get the picture.  It is making my head hurt just thinking about it.  It went fairly well except the wings were pretty flimsy especially with the added weight of the burners and guns, so Jared helped me tie some string on it and then we tried to make the string stand out less by adding c3p0 on it.  Now, that I was proud of, my mural.....not so much.  I kept telling everyone that at least my little 8-10 year old boys would be like "hey, that sister Ivey is all right, she is just like us."  Because that mural was right at their skill level!  hahaha

Back to the Mural.  I had to deal with those eyes whether I liked it or not.  I tried 3 different times and each time it got worse and worse.  Surprisingly I never shed a tear over poor luke's badly mangled face.    Finally I had a moment of genius / desperation, however you choose to look at it, sunglasses!  I could just make his creepy eyes into sunglasses.  And hey!  His face could look a little mangled because remember he was in some sort of accident where he really did mangle his face?  So, I think things are looking up.  I called my daughter into the room to get her honest reaction.  It wasn't good.  My plan was completely transparent.  What could any self respecting artist do?  Have their daughter pretend to kill it with a light saber and have a good laugh!

The time came for pulling all of these pieces together.  Now the death star was not made by me, but the super artistic guy that used to do all these things that I apparently had the need to out do because I am crazy competitive even when I am way out of my league. He, btw, was very kind to me and my art that night.  We used Nate's gully suit to "submerge" the xwing into the swamp and I had little yoda head boxes that were on clearance from valentines day that made excellent center pieces.  I tried to cover up as much of the mural as possible with the swampy vines and someone moved them to see the picture better.  So there you have it.  That was my crowning moment on my stint in the cub scout program because I had been called to serve in the young women's program again before the event.  I am going to miss my boys terribly.  They are so sweet and super cute.  Just as I thought, my boys thought my artwork was wicked awesome and loved me for the effort, which is all I really cared about anyway.