The Leatherkid Chronicles: Cal Van Gogh

Cal spent the better part of his awake hours last weekend drawing. His mediums of choice included crayons, colored pencils and washable markers carefully applied to “scrap” paper (paper with printing on one side and a blank slate on the other). His workspace was the kitchen island, selected primarily because it would keep his masterpieces out of Ella’s sloppy reach. And his chosen subject depended on the day – on Saturday, it was Les Miserables; on Sunday, it was Sandra Boynton characters.

Yes, Les Miserables. Not too long ago, Dan caught a WTTW special promoting the 25^th anniversary of the musical part way through and captured what he could on DVR. The bulk of the special was a broadcast of a 2010 stage performance in London. It’s fantastic, really; and Cal thinks so, too. With a little help from Dan (who’s been reading the book and knows the characters intimately) and a remarkable memory, Cal knows the names of most of the costumed characters singing at microphones on the stage. His favorite? Thenadier, rogue innkeeper and Eponine’s father, mostly because he dresses “like a pirate” (and thankfully not at all because he’s a rotten person to the core).

At any rate, Cal drew this picture without announcing his plans to do so:

Scene from "Les Miserables," just before the battle near the end

Maybe 2/3 of the way through his drawing it, I realized what it was he was doing. “Cal Daniel!” I exclaimed, truly amazed by what I had just realized. “You’re drawing Les Mis!”

“No, I’m not,” he replied, but didn’t volunteer what it was he was supposedly “really” drawing, probably because it was, in fact, Les Mis as I had suggested. And he proceeded to fill in some details above the stage performers, which I’ve come to learn are a drummer, another orchestra guy, a pirate-looking French soldier and Thenadier (in the middle of the picture). I’ve also come to learn the scene – it’s just before the battle near the end of the story; and on the stage are, from right, Valjean, Javert, Gavroche, Combferre, the French soldier and Enjorlas.

That was Saturday. On Sunday, he switched gears and brought me into the mix. He started with a request to draw a scene from the pages of "Pajama Time," written and illustrated by Sandra Boynton, which I obliged (and incidentally felt pretty pleased with the end result):

Opening scene from Sandra Boynton's "Pajama Time"

Cal’s funny when he asks me to draw things – it needs to be exactly like the source picture (at least through his eyes), otherwise he throws a fit and asks me to draw it again. This one was acceptable to him. He also likes to participate a bit. In the case of this one, Cal colored in things like eyeballs, sand and jumprope handles and added details like the sun, tree leaves and the shovel, which he had initially asked me to leave out. He also initially insisted I leave out the bucket by the hippo’s feet, which I did, but then felt like I had to fill in the gap with a second hippo foot. He then asked me to add the bucket, which I tried to tell him was too late to do because the second foot was now there… trust me... but he didn’t let me off the hook and decided he'd just color the first foot red so it looked like a continuation of the hippo's pant leg. Pretty sharp, that kid. And finally he signed it for both of us -- one "by Sandra" for him, one "by Sandra" for me.

And then he took over, announcing that he was going to draw a bunch of pictures for his book. He started drawing hippos and hippo scenes from scratch as though he was Sandra Boynton himself. And this evolved to other animals and scenes, also “by Sandra Boynton” (though really just from his own head). And my role in this? In each of the pictures, I got to color the sky the color that he selected. Blue… purple… green… it varied based on the wishes of my whimsical Cal.

At any rate, here are some of the other “Sandra Boynton” pictures (with some random letters and my colored skies) drawn by Cal on Sunday, soon to be "published" in his book along with others he's drawn since then: