Daddy Does Drawings

One of the joys of being a dad I'm finding is that I get to do creative things for my daughter. For about a week now I've been hard at work on some cartoons. Between the cartoons I draw other things, and one night I decided I'd do something special for my little girl; I'd do something that was just for her. She, like many a toddler, I'm sure, loves Finding Nemo, especially the scene with the whale. She goes nuts when it's time for the whale. I'm not kidding. She turns into a squirming, thrashing, squealing pile of crazy. It seemed like a natural choice for something to draw for her, and this is what I made.

When she got up in the morning I showed it to her. She took one sleepy look at it, then her eyes snapped open, she beamed her brightest little girl smile and yelled "oooh a whale!" Deep inside my heart my own inner child did a cartwheel. At some point during the same day my daughter was bouncing around the house and being generally disruptive because we'd run out of things for her to do, until I put the picture of the whale down on the scanner and printed out a copy. I handed her the image I copied from my sketchbook and a couple of crayons. She beamed that smile at me again and some secret little part of my soul where I keep my store of happy did a backflip. 

She took those crayons and the printed whale and did this:

I don't know if it's fridge worthy, but overall I'm pretty proud of it. 

After I'd drawn the whale it opened up a range of possibilities and sometime later that weekend, maybe the next morning, I was drawing a cartoon when my daughter crawled up into my lap to see what I was doing. The cartoon I was working on was a little more complicated than I could manage with a toddler all up in my business. I asked her if she would like daddy to draw an elephant. I don't know if she understood more than "daddy," "elephant," and that I was asking her a question, but she said, "yeah" and that was all I needed. I drew this for her in about ten minutes. 

Those of you who have toddlers or have had toddlers will understand that ten minutes is really the threshold for how long they can pay attention to anything, but I managed to get an excited exclamation of "ELEPHANT" before she scampered off to destroy something in her bedroom. 

Since then I've gone on to do a few more drawings for her in the same vein. Here they are. 

    

I really enjoy these, and more importantly my little girl really seems to like them as well. It's something I hope she doesn't grow out of too quickly, because I would like to go on making little cartoons for her.