Guy From the Movie Free Birds

Our family spent all of last week on the Disney Wonder cruise ship traveling up the west coast from San Diego to Vancouver, Canada. We had a blast together and enjoyed our very first family cruise.

Yesterday was Memorial Day so we were all off from school and work for one more day. While he watched the movie Free Birds on his iPad mini, he paused it and said with a big grin on his face, “Daddy, tomorrow I want you to draw this.”

I walked over to take a look. To my surprise, he hadn’t paused it on one of the main characters or one of the main scenes. Instead, he had picked this shot of the character Governor Bradford. “This one?” I asked.

“He looks funny, right?”

“He does.”

“I took a snapshot so that we’d have it for tomorrow.”

This morning, I asked him as I always do, “What should we do today for the snack sack?”

“The Disney Wonder!” he shouted.

“We’ve kind of already done that.”

“No. That was just a cruise ship.”

“No. It was a Disney cruise ship.”

“But it wasn’t the Wonder. It was another ship.”

“Um,” I stalled. I didn’t want to draw another cruise ship. I change directions. “Remember yesterday you wanted me to do a character from that movie?”

“Which movie?”

“Free Birds.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said with a giggle. He immediately went to get his iPad. He turned it on and burst out laughing when he spotted the saved image. “Yeah. Do this!”

I sat down to start drawing. I could tell it was going to be a challenge. “This is hard because it’s not a line drawing,” I told him.

“It’s okay. You can do it,” he said encouragingly.

“I’ll try, but it’s tough to make it look like in the cartoon with just the Sharpie.”

Mid-way through, he came over to take a look at my progress. He giggled when he saw it and said, “It’s still funny when you draw it. You know what makes it funny? His eyes and these lines,” he said pointing to the Governor’s forehead. “Are you going to make him look fat?”

“I’ll try, but I don’t know how to make those shadows like in the picture.” In the end, I focused mainly on his eyes, hair, and mustache since those are the character’s most prominent features. I ran out of time for anything else. I think it came out alright, but not great. He liked it and laughed again when he saw it finished.

Later that afternoon, when he came home, he took it out of his backpack and giggled again. “I showed it to my friends and they laughed when they saw it. It’s okay to laugh, right? It’s supposed to be funny, right?”

“Sure. It’s funny,” I assured him.