Elora's wow words

In Elora's fifth grade class this last year, they had a fun, ongoing assignment that was perfect for her. Every few weeks, they would get a W.O.W. word, or "Word of the week". They were given a definition and then had to create a drawing to go with the word, which was then displayed in the hallway until the next one.
They were given about a week to work on each one; some kids got done in one day, and Elora's teacher was nice enough to let her take as long as she wanted to finish hers...which was often at least two weeks. But she came up with some awesome pictures!
I've said it before, Elora already draws better than I could by ninth grade, and she is very creative. So I thought I'd post her "wow words" here for you to check out. Remember you can click on them to make it bigger.

She looked at the movie cover for "Aladdin" for clothing ideas on this one.

The sheriff is holding a small star badge and saying it's immaculate. Everyone in her class loved the vulture poop. Haha.She looked up photo references for the bird and the tumbleweed, so she could draw them correctly.

 For this one, she had me find a picture of the palace guards in England, to see how tall their hats are. The funniest part is the portrait on the wall, where the frame is full of a hat and eyes, instead of the face, Hilarious.

For this one, Elora knew she wanted to draw a goat, but was looking for an idea that would work. I showed her a Youtube video of a goat in a palm tree, and that's what she drew! She cut out some brown paper for the tree, and again found photo references for the goat and tree to draw them right.

I think the name of this class is funny. She loosely based the chef on the Sweedish chef from the Muppets.

I like how she made the different kinds of light in this one. She was trying hard to show colors as well as how dark it was in the room, not an easy feat. The window and stars turned out great!

I hope Elora gets to do more projects like this next year!

Elora's colorful 11 pictures

 I just KNOW you've been waiting for Elora's birthday pictures. Since apparently that's what this blog is all about: birthday pictures. We went to the art ally in Rapid City,  where we took Josh's pictures last year because those turned out so fun...and Elora has had the "fall trees" theme going on in her pictures for the last few years in a row.

The graffiti in the alley change all the time (and is rarely profane in nature), and even though there weren't as many murals as we've seen in the past (I'll talk about that another time) there were still lots of great places for pictures!

Elora loves red, so we planned on her wearing this outfit: the guitar shirt works great with the graffiti, the plaid shirt is always a good way to look cool (according to her mom at least, who may be stuck in the early 90's) and I made the patches on Elora's pants a few weeks ago when they were starting to wear out. I kinda wish they were mine, actually.

A.  I love these two, which show the whole alley. I love Elora's stance, her face, etc. I only wish it showed more cool artwork, instead of a corridor of garbage cans. Oh well, I guess that's what you find in alleys, right?



We were lucky to find several spots that had perfect colors to go with Elora's outfit. This is one of the first spots. There were tons of places with this red line going through the middle of the wall; I imagine the same person did all of them, and it worked perfectly for all of our pictures.

B. In this group, I like the layout of the top right one and the bottom right one best.
























C. This spot was perfect. I wish I'd taken some nicer, more creative photos here, because the colors and abstract wall were great. Note the red line again. It was Elora's idea to stand up on top of the wall. I also like the ones with the ground showing because there are a few fall leaves scattered about. I think the top left is maybe the best. (We took some serious pictures, just like with Joshua.)

D.  This was a fun spot, it's just a few feet over from the location of the photos in "C". I didn't even notice that Elora had a question mark right above her head, and I'm not sure if I like it or not. Oh well, she looks cute in them anyway!

 

We found a lot of staircases to sit on. This first one is one of my favorite places in the alley, but the staircase is blocked off by a little fence thing. So we took pictures on top of it! I love that there is a tree in the alley, so you can tell it's fall. Elora likes the top left one that shows the tree more, and I like the top right one because of the interesting angle. The bottom right is at a different spot.

E.

 

F. Another staircase. I like all of these. The top right is the best close up, but I also like the angle of the top left.

G. The top two spots here were cute, but I'm not sure the colors look good with Elora's clothes. The bottom spot was great, but I think she could have maybe posed different, like maybe standing behind the railing? Oh well.  Red line here again...

H. Another good sitting spot. I like the artwork here, but Elora thought it was a little weird. I like these pictures too, though it almost seems like we're trying to highlight Elora's shoes, as they are closest to the camera.

I. This spot was at one end of the alley, so the light was shining in, which could be good or bad. It was actually a cloudy day up until this point, which worked well so we didn't have harsh light like with some of Joshua's pictures. I liked all the colorful boxes here, and I experimented with the colors being bright, or faded. I like the faded one, but I know from experience that sometimes when I print these, the photo place tries to "correct" the picture, and it doesn't look quite how I'd like. Anyway. I like the layout and face of the top left one the best, but the blowing hair in the bottom left is fun too.

J. Finally, I thought this was funny. I loved this place because of the bright colors, the black fence, and the red line, but I didn't even notice until I was viewing these on my computer that the wall says "2016"  right behind Elora! Haha. I wonder if someone else was taking senior pictures or something and put that there? Either way, that's perfect for commemorating a birthday!

Which one do you like best?

Elora's story

For my birthday present last month, Elora wrote a funny story for me. If you have the time, I suggest you read it; it's kind of funny. We got a new scanner though, and it doesn't seem to scan pencil on paper that well, so that's sad. I was able to fix most of them, although it did loose some of the lighter lines and fine details. If you click on each picture, you should be able to see it larger and read it, but I guess I'll include the text too, just in case.

 below:  Once upon a time there was a princess named Plum. She was very nice, and she loved her people. She liked to try new things. One day she had a crumb brought to her for lunch. "What's this?" She asked. "It's a crumb!" said her servant.

The princess ate the crumb."Oh! That was delicious!" Said Princess Plum. She spent the rest of the day telling her people to try crumbs.

The next day, the princess woke up with a sore throat! "I don't feel so good," she said. The nurse came to check Princess Plum for a sickness. "There's nothing wrong with you," said the nurse.
 

"At least I get chicken soup!" said the princess. What she didn't know was that she had eaten an evil crumb. And the crumb was trying to kill her so he could be prince and have servants.
 

The next day, she woke up with a tummy ache and called her doctor. The doctor said, "There's a crumb in your stomach!" " It has two eyes!" she said. 

"Ahh!" Princess Plum screamed. "How do I get it out?!" she cried. "You have to heat something yucky," said the doctor. "Oh no!" said Princess Plum.

So at dinner that night, she ate the thing she hated most: fried scorpions. "Eww!" she screamed. "Eat it!" said her father. "Or that evil crumb will stay."

So poor Princess Plum ate her disgusting fried scorpions all up. "It'll take two days for him to come out." said the doctor.

So for two long, long days, Princess Plum ate nothing but fried scorpions. Poor poor Princess Plum was feeling so glum But when the third day came, the princess was so excited, she jumped out of her bed!
 

She ran to her parents royal room and yelled, "Today's the day! that morning at breakfast,everybody gathered around Princess Plum, waiting for the evil crumb to come out.

Then after everybody was quiet, a crumb popped out of her mouth! "Those fried scorpions smelled horrible!" he said. And with that, he ran out of the room, never to be seen again.
 

And the kingdom rejoiced, and had a big party with everybody invited to it. There was a pinata, a feast, fireworks, a play, and a giant cake! Everybody lived happily ever after!
 

(I don't know about you, but I was really worried that crumb was going to come out a different way!)

colaborative works

In our bag of kid activities for Sacrament meeting, we have four or five notebooks of lined paper, so the kids can draw while they sit and listen. As you know, Elora loves to draw, (and name her characters)

 



and at least at church, the other kids enjoy it too. Joshua has always liked drawing monsters,

 
 

 
 while Jonah is starting to move beyond stick people with big tummies.

  Eli has just recently jumped from scribbles to stick people and monsters too.

One day several months ago, I was looking through the notebook pages trying to find a blank page. When I couldn't find one, I decided to just add to the scribbles already on the page. ( I don't draw at church very often at all these days, and I didn't want to take up a page someone else could use.)
The scribble made some nice hair, no?

Another day, I found some half-finished drawings that Josh or Jonah had done, so I decided to finish one. This was fun!



In fact, I decided Josh wouldn't mind a little embellishment to a few more of his monster drawings. This was the first addition done, drawn quickly and to Joshua's delight.



Of course, then Elora had to try it too. Copycat.



 And one time, I think Josh is the one who sabotaged Elora's drawing, with the monster coming out of the genie lamp. Haha. Elora always makes cool outfits for her characters.

And at some point, Jonah found a pair of pants Elora had drawn without an occupant, so he decided to fill and color them himself. (Green is Jonah's favorite color, and therefore Eli's favorite as well.)

 



Once again, I turned the tables on Joshua's monster: now the guy his creature is attacking has a pet monster on a chain that's even bigger! Mwaahahaha.



Of course, my favorite addition wasn't exactly Joshua's. But he did get a good laugh out if it.

sisters

This picture measures 11x14, and was drawn with Prismacolor pencil on toned paper. The colors seem slightly off from the real drawing; my camera has a hard time with yellows I guess. I thought this was a fun picture of River and Elora; I focused in on River because her expression was so cute.

What do you think?

Ten years old!

Elora is now ten years old! To take her pictures, we planned on going to the same place we took Eli's pictures,but before that, we visited a grove of yellow trees just a block from our house. We were lucky we'd found it too, as when we went to Eli's photo location, much of the leaves were already gone!
We got some cool pictures in the grove of trees. The only issue was that the light was a little intense for my camera, which sometimes has issues with bright yellows and oranges. This spot was so pretty! But I'm not sure if I like this brighter version here, or the toned down one in the next group better.






















I like all of these pictures so much! I can't decide  which is the best. The top left is the same as the above picture (just faded colors). The top right was my favorite at first, but now I kind of like the bottom right too.
A.

B. These pictures are awesome because of the way Elora is framed by the light, especially in the two on the right.

We drove down the road about three miles to this spot where we took Eli's pics a few weeks earlier. The different light and weather made it look completely transformed! The reflections on the water were really cool in person, but in the photos I think they might be a little distracting. Plus, to expose for the water, it made the foliage and sky above really washed out. We had fun there though!

C.

D.

Before we left, we took a few photos out on the grass before we got to our car. The light was pretty, unfortunately I failed to notice the stupid plant right in front of Elora. It looks almost like she's holding it!

E.

We had a beautiful day, and Elora got some great pictures!