In an attempt to be more environmentally friendly, I've avoided using wrapping paper for the last several years. I save all the gift bags from birthdays, Christmas, and other special events to reuse, which serves us adequately. However, I know that there is something satisfying about unwrapping a present, a feeling that pulling tissue paper out of a bag can't quite match. For that reason, I've taken to wrapping some of the girls' Christmas presents with reused material: saved brown paper grocery bags, leftover wallpaper samples, brown packing paper from Amazon packages.
I still want this "upcycled" wrapping to look festive, so I draw cute Christmas pictures on them. Since I have no natural (or learned) artistic skill, I use YouTube directed drawings, primarily from the Art for Kids Hub, where an enthusiastic dad guides the drawing alongside one of his children. In the videos, the dad walks the audience through the drawing, step by step--draw a long, straight line here; add a curve there. At the end, he encourages the audience to color it in however they want, though he shows his fully-colored image too. The final drawings are cartoons, with thick black Sharpie lines and exaggerated features.
Last night I used the channel's videos to decorate Amelia's and Clara's packages with the following: a penguin in winter clothes; hugging snowmen in a snow globe; a smiling cup of hot chocolate with smiling marshmallows; and a svelte arctic fox. I'm particularly proud of the fox, which has some light-blue shading and looks like a Pokémon.
Directed drawings are incredibly popular now--both of my girls regularly do them in school--but they obviously didn't exist in the pre-YouTube era of my elementary school days. There were some "how to" books, but for the most part, you could either draw, or you couldn't. Today, anyone can complete a "skiing squirrel" or "jellybean Santa." No doubt directed drawing has its critics. It's not real art--the wide-eyed, cutesy characters look a lot alike--or reflective of real talent. It puts its users into a connect-the-dots box, rather than encouraging creativity and discovery. Still, discovering that I can complete something worthy with five minutes guidance on the computer perhaps works to challenge the binary of artist/not-artist I've had most of my life. It makes me a little more confident that I'm capable of learning.
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