When I was in Kindergarten I was given a boxy, plastic
device called a View-Master, along with some white cardboard disks that had
tiny squares of film around their edges. I would put one of the ‘reels’ into
the slot on top, look into the eye-hole lenses, push down the lever on the side…and,
Oh My! I would see beautiful, blazing-with-color 3-D scenes of wild flowers in mountain
meadows. The context: This was before TV, and, our Brownie Box Camera took black
and white pictures. Since that gift, I’ve loved watching for special views through
‘apertures’…like a garden seen between
two broken fence slats, a carnival parade
between two buildings, a school of minnows between two lily pads.
So, this morning…I wasn’t
disappointed when I learned I couldn’t go to the beach edge due to private
property ownership issues. A very nice person let me sit on his porch to sketch,
and, poor me: I had to peek between his and his neighbor’s roofs to see ‘the
scene.’ My original color in the sketches looked ‘regular’…so, I gave them both
another dose of pigment, and enjoyed a blazing fond memory of my old View-Master.
Strathmore sketch pad-Toned Tan. 01, 03 Micron
pens. Prismacolor pencils.
