Draw Me Something Good

Don’t tell her, but there may be something wrong with my wife. Several of us have an app called Draw Something, where we are given a word which we have to illustrate using digital finger paints. It’s a fun game, sometimes challenging, and it helps us keep in touch, however slightly, with friends and distant family.

Most of us, the normal ones among us, anyway, draw simple figures and shapes, just enough to convey the sense of what the image is. We use the color palette sparingly, again, just enough to get the point across.

And then there’s Kelly. Kelly has a background for every image. Kelly uses broad, bold strokes to make her way through the meat of the image, not just the essence, and she isn’t afraid to erase. She often trashes whole pages and starts over, and doesn’t mind taking 20 or 30 minutes getting the image just right.

What’s wrong with this woman? Sure, we can always tell what she’s drawn, which is the point, but Van Gogh himself wouldn’t put that much into it.

That’s just the way she is, though, now that I think about it, and one reason I adore her so. She uses table clothes and hand-knitted doilies. She spends nearly as much on gift wrapping as she does on gifts. Her cookies, always delicious, are exactly the same size as each other.

What’s wrong with this woman? Nothing, I say, nothing at all.