A Simple Stool

twos stoolI started the week planning to write about this simple stool, a beautiful wooden step stool hand painted by the Toddler 2s and their teachers.  It has tiny thumb and finger prints embellished to appear like insects.  The stool rests prominently on the table of items displayed for the Seed art silent auction, which reaches its finale on Saturday afternoon at the Seed picnic.  Given the bidding war going on for that little green stool, it will no doubt be a dramatic finale.

As I considered writing about the stool, I also thought of writing about a few other items, including two paper maché guitars, a wooden box filled with wooden planets, a quilt, a clay alphabet and a teapot bird house.  Quite an eclectic assemblage added to more traditionally framed art.  The thing is, though, my mind has been elsewhere.  If I could describe my week in one word, it would be Photoshop.

Over the years, I’ve been minimally involved in the yearbook production.  For years we had an exceptionally talented parent who did a good portion of the work, supported by a few staff members and other parents.  The yearbook was a piece of art, well documenting each school year.  All that shifted last year as the yearbook went through a major change.  We had to find a way to produce it as simply and inexpensively as possible.  Using a website called Mixbooks, another talented parent not only gave lots of her time for last year’s yearbook, but left us with an excellent template.

I didn’t sign up for the committee, although somewhere along the way I landed on it.  I think I offered to do some of the backgrounds, bowed out when I found out we had a Photoshop-worthy parent on board, then ended up working on a few after all.  I’ve wrestled with Photoshop for years.  My skills were limited at best.  After checking out a few YouTube videos, however, something clicked and before I knew it, my week was overtaken by Photoshop.  It was a high learning curve kind of week, and also a fun one.  I love learning new skills, especially when art is involved.  The most enjoyable part, though, was the collaboration with such talented and hard working people.  Just another reminder of the concentrated pool of creative people staffing the Seed.  Of course, that’s obvious when you check out the collection of art for this year’s auction, little green step stool included.

 

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