Hands

I wrote this back in June. I'd been having a massive creative block and couldn't figure out why. With everything that was going on in the world, I couldn't write or even scrap about it. I even tried doing a scrapbook page about having a creative block and all it did was make me realize my block was probably because I was just overwhelmed.

Back in 2001, I did a PowerPoint photo video after 911. I wasn't really involved in any sort of social media, in fact in 2001 AOL and email WAS social media. I emailed that video to everyone on my email list and encouraged them to share it if they felt moved to do so. I actually received a reply email from my friend who told me that he loved the video. He told me the creative people create in their own ways after major disasters to allow people who are not naturally creative to reconcile their feelings with works that express the words they need but can't find. That's not verbatim, but it's essentially what he told me.

It made me feel like I had an obligation to create, not just for my own outlet, but that it was necessary to share my work. But as the first half of this year was a couple months from ending, there had been so many awful things going on that I just short circuited.

I turned to my personal journal, my trusty journal that I've always been able to just write until my problems come out of me and are solved.

Honestly, I sat down to write about COVID-19 and it turned into stories from my past and of rant about the current protests. SO many things that are just wrong right now.

After the photo are the actual words to Hands. I was watching late night TV and a musical performance by a band with a very dark skinned singer and I noticed the inside of his hands as he held the microphone. I started thinking about all the people I know and realized how similar the color of the inside of all of our hands are. When I said to the TV, and it's a line that you'll read in Hands, that those similar hands that we all have are the same hands we put together to pray, I started weeping and I cried until the end of this song. I had to go back and download the song so I could hear it because at some point what I was seeing struck me so strongly that I was crying too hard to listen to the music. And that was the beginning of my creative block ending.

Hands

Who are you?

Who is your neighbor?

Who is your coworker?

Who is that stranger?

How do we define ourselves?

How do we define friends and family?

How do we define everyone?

How do we define anyone?

Look at the back of your hands

Are they light, bronzed, olive, dark?

Is that you, your color, your race?

What makes that shade you?

Now flip your hands over.

That color is incredibly close to the same color 

as the inside of every other hand

What do you do with that part of your hand?

You put together 

The insides of your hands

To pray or meditate,

When you think or plan

You hold the inside of your child’s hand

With the inside of your hand

You shake the inside of someone’s hand

With the inside of yours

A musician uses the inside of their hand

To strike keys on a piano, 

touch the frets on a guitar, bass, violin, banjo

To hold a drumstick or a microphone

The earliest painting we do is with the inside of the hand 

Talented older painters hold the brush inside their hands

Ceramics and pottery is shaped with the inside of hands

Crafters at home hold their supplies inside their hands

An athlete throws a ball, catches a ball, dribbles a ball

Holds a bat, a racket, a golf club, a hockey stick

Proudly clutches a trophy or medal 

with the inside of their hands

A cook, chef, baker, uses the inside of their hands

To hold the spoon that stirs food in a restaurant

To knead dough, and put cookies or a pizza in the oven

At work, or anyone at home

An architect draws with the inside of their hands

A builder plans and schedules with the inside of their hands

A carpenter, electrician, construction worker 

uses the inside of their hands to build

One last push and a doctor brings a baby into the world 

A mother holds the newborn against her for the first time

A father caresses them both

All with the inside of their hands

On the inside our blood is the same color

But on the outside what parts of our bodies define us?

Parts where we look more different

Or the parts where we are more the same?

The Creative Process

I've been doing my Project 365 as a scrapbooked diary for a few years now. I do the layouts with the daily journal entries and an assortment of photos, clip art, memes, cartoons and scrapbook elements. NFL playoff scores in early 2015 was the first appearance of the character I knew in my mind as "the Foxborough Fox." The fox was included three times in 2015 by the Pats' post season scores finishing sitting on a football near a “We’re #1” banner and the Super Bowl score.

As the Patriots started into the playoffs last January the Fox was back with the Patriots scores. I decided to have some fun with New England promotional items from the web. In one of those 2016 playoff results pics he's holding a Tom Brady doll and his name changed and his identity formed. He became Brady the Patriots fan and the image of a boy under ten years old. Giving him a personality gave me direction for molding him to be more than just a logo element. The Foxborough Fox was the same expression holding a Patriots sign. Brady is a superfan with all of his football fan stuff and the exuberance and team loyalty of a child.

I'll make a note of a couple things at this point. First off I'm creative and artistic but a different kind of creative and artistic than someone who sets pencil to paper and draws cute animals. My dad would always draw horses when I was a kid. It was just something he doodled. Every time I tried to draw a horse it looked like a dinosaur. I've been doing creative things for a half a century now and if I i try to draw a horse it still looks like a dinosaur… like a five-year-old trying to draw a horse, dinosaur. But I do well manipulating images. The Foxborough Fox is an element from a kit called Falling 4 U by Keystone Scraps.

The other thing is that I absolutely adore is watching young kids at sporting events and the unconditional love and loyalty they have for their favorite teams and players. So it's not a surprise that I would find an element that I really like and start manipulating that to turn it into it the character of an eight-year-old boy.

As this your started, I made the conscious decision to follow my #2 sport more closely and was therefore, even as the baseball season was ending, making a point of paying attention to MY favorite two teams. Brady was going to present both the Patriots and Lions scores every week. I started thinking, or may be overthinking but that's what I do, that Brady needed a buddy to watch football with and maybe it would be a good idea if his buddy was a Lions fan. So the search for Brady's best friend began. I found Brady’s BFF in At The Zoo by Mags Graphics.

As the season went on the characters developed, their friendship developed and the entire story of Brady and Ford formed and is still forming. For me it's just fun. “Knowing” the story of the week adds to creating the scrapbook vignette.

Brady and Ford are eight-year-olds in Toledo. They are 3rd graders in the Toledo Public School system. They live in the same neighborhood, just a few houses apart and are best friends.

Brady is an only child. His parents were originally from New England and they moved to Toledo when Brady's mom had a great job offer. Brady's whole family are Patriots fans and they get the NFL Sunday Ticket so they can see the Patriots games every week. Ford and Brady watch football games together at one of their houses. They often go to Ford’s house for the Lions games and Brady's house for the Patriots games.

Ford's dad works in Michigan and his mom works part time but she’s home in the afternoon when Ford gets home from school. The boys spend weekday afternoons at Ford's house. Ford has a big brother in college and a high school senior sister but, "she doesn't like football so she doesn't matter anyway."

That's pretty much the whole story right now. It grows as it needs to for the single frame cartoons with the football scores. David helped me develop Ford's family with Ford being his parents pleasant surprise baby. This came from a discussion that we had because he was surprised that my characters went to Toledo Public Schools. But they had to go to TPS because it was snowing on the Sunday that the network decided they weren't going to show the Lions game. I needed a reason for a snow sculpture. LOL

Week 16 was great fun for Brady who watched the game with his cousins when they were back East for the holidays.

It was a little rougher for Ford. No school meant he got to stay up to watch Monday Night Football but the Lions lost.

The creative process can be a never ending source of imagination and fun!