Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Kid's College Part 2

You may recall that C is taking a painting class at Kid's College this week.

Yesterday, she announced that her teacher is a Professional Pet Portrait Painter who asked that all the kids bring in a snapshot of their pet for class the next day. She was going to help each student paint (on canvas) a picture of their pet from the snapshot.

Here we go again.

C was all frantic because we didn't have a picture of Choo choo, her one and only pet -- goldfish.

Now, Choo choo has been a member of our family since C was 18 months old -- she's 6 now. Pretty good life out of a feeder fish from the Petco. I should have a picture of him. I do have pictures of the girls with Choo choo's clear 1-gallon abode wherein one can barely make out a silvery/yellow object in the bowl. However, if you didn't know the silvery/yellow blip was supposed to be a live goldfish, you wouldn't know the difference.

C goes into panic mode. Not only does she not have a real pet, but the pet she does have, is not all that photogenic. I don't have a digital camera with an optical zoom (digital zooms suck), so I had to resort to using the still function of my video camera to get a good close-up of her fish. At least he/she/it held still long enough for me to get some decent poses.

Off I go to my iBook, where I imported the 640x480 still to iMovie, exported it as a still frame, only to be printed out on our 600dpi laser printer.

Here are the digital results.




The printed pictures C ended up taking to her class were much muddier, grey and white laser printed renderings of an aging $.39 feeder goldfish that is no longer gold but more transparently flesh in color.

Ever the trooper, C took the non-photos of her non-pet into class and ended up doing a pretty good rendering of her beloved scaled soulmate.

Her teacher told her that the pose she picked (center) was a unique angle for a fish and thought that it captured the spirit of her aquatic buddy in striking detail.

Bless her Professinal Pet Portrait Painter heart.

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