A Mural of the Artist as a Young Man

So Gamble painted today. Not ordinary painting, as you can see. I hooked him up.

You see, I needed to paint the little alcove in our garage, and I had primed it yesterday with his help. It was tough managing him while trying to paint, and it didn't go as well as it could have.

Today, I decided to give him something a little different to do.

I had some stands that I made for a garage sale and a long piece of plywood (2 x 8). Gamble helped me drive some screws to hold them together. I was originally going to let him use the paint we picked out, but I found some old paint I was planning to get rid of anyway. The paint was brick red, teal green, and light blue, all colors found in our house.

I had to rig up his smock, which was all ripped up, by taping it around his midsection with packing tape. Then, to cover his legs, I cut the top off a drawstring garbage bag and drew the string tight around his waist and tied it.

Then the pride. Oh, the pride. I was talking to him about some of the rules about painting, being careful, keeping the paint on the board, not on the Gamble or the floor, the walls, etc. I gave him a brush for each paint can, so he wouldn't mix them. And then I wondered aloud where to put the brushes when he wasn't using them. I talked him through laying them across the top of the open can.

"Daddie? I have an idea."

I like when he says that. It's music to my ears. He's really thinking.

"What's that, G?"

"Well, Daddie, you can just take the lids off, and we can put the brushes on the lids."

Man, do I love this little boy. He was so right, and as silly as you may think I am for not thinking of it, I was just as proud that he had thought of it. And that's exactly what he did.

And everything went amazingly smoothly. The only hitch was that as he leaned over to dip the brush in, he swabbed some of the paint off the board with his hair. He ended up with some blue and some green in his hair. I asked him what he thought Mommie would do if she saw what we were doing.

"Kill us," he said, in a hilarious matter-of-fact tone.

So what's it a mural of? Gamble loves his family so much, it's a portrait of us. The biggest green blob is him, of course. The big red blob is Mommie, while the little blue blob with the green slash is me. Random is represented by a little red blob to the northwest of Mommie, kinda like Alassica, but not to scale.