And Now... The Rest of the Story

I thought it would be funny to describe what really happened behind the scenes of those gorgeous drawings in the last post.

Mary does most of her work from photographs. Her husband is a photographer, so they came over to take some pictures of the boys to work from. Needless to say, it was yet another picture disaster. Andrew was crying a large portion of the time, he wouldn't sit on the bench with Christian, and Jonathon was forced to hold him. After the first 15 minutes, Christian got grumpy and refused to smile for any of the remaining shots. Not exactly ideal conditions for trying to create a work of art. They took about 50 pictures trying to get the right lighting and the right pose, but when they left, I was pretty sure that they had ZERO usable pictures.

I was right.

Luckily, Mary is not only a gifted artist, but she is pretty great at photoshop as well. Using heads, bodies, and arms from different pictures, she created the final image that she drew. If you look closely, you can see where she stitched all of the different photos together. When she showed us this, we laughed like crazy. Seriously... they both have a head, body, and arm from different photos. See for yourself:

Looking at the finished product, you would never know that my children weren't complete angels through the whole process.

This is why we hired Mary.

This is why we didn't get family pictures taken.

Enough said.