This regular blogging schedule thing isn’t working out too well as of late, huh?
Much of last week was spent fretting over Sunday morning’s Kids Adventure time. It was my turn in the rotation to handle the weekly story. “Fretting”, not because it’s a particularly difficult ten minutes, but because I hold myself to an unreasonably high standard for these kinds of things. I know it’s unreasonably high, but I can’t be personally satisfied with myself unless I put several hours of thought into what I’m going to do. I also tend to go with a different method of storytelling each time, so thinking up new tricks each month is a bit time-consuming.
This past Sunday it was Jesus and Peter walking on water. Having had some success with rough sketches on the whiteboard for my last story about Joshua and the walls of Jericho, I decided to go with pre-drawn, original pictures this time. The actual drawing process took place over several hours on the prior Saturday, but I had spent a lot of thought-time beforehand planning for Saturday.
The drawings themselves are about what can be expected from five hours’ work—rough, but suitable. I went over each one in three passes: first a rough sketch to set up poses, then a detailed sketch, and finally coloring (with the 36-pencil set I bought a couple of months ago for church/English use). Fortunately the human brain is good at filling in details when the drawings are viewed from a distance, so they look better several feet away than right in front of you.
As always I was relieved to get past Sunday morning. The story went quite well, I think—probably better than any of the previous stories. It’s still difficult to tell the story in Japanese, so I have to make sure I go over exactly what I want to say no less than three times the day before. But somehow it turns out well in the end.
This is the first time I’ve seriously employed drawing in the Kids Adventure lesson. I’ve forgotten how much I like drawing. Last Thursday I started sketching out some ideas for how I wanted the characters for Sunday to look, and since then I’ve spent several hours and three sheets of A4 paper on random, unrelated drawings. Nothing unusual, actually—every so often I fool myself into thinking I can be an artist. But from a strictly fun-ness standpoint, drawing is surprisingly enjoyable and relaxing.