Greetings everyone, and welcome back to the final installment of my Nostalgia Week! To close out the week, I'm going to be looking at a more personal memory that is not a franchise like the other two, but I'm still hopeful that some of you will understand the kind of thing I'm talking about. Anyway, today's topic is........the backyard.
~click for larger version~
Sounds rather simple, I know......but yeah, the backyard. At my current home, my backyard is very small and on a hill. Not to mention that over half the yard is covered with pine straw for our plants and trees. And it's tightly fenced in from all sides, even more so than when we first moved here. So there's not much room to run around to play. But I'm an adult - I don't do much "playing in the yard" these days anyway. The only reasons I usually go back there are to sit and mingle with friends in the fresh air or mow the lawn.
11 or 12 years ago, before I moved to my current residence, my family had a different backyard. This yard was big, and I mean big. Almost the length of a football field. And it had very few trees, so most of the yard was clear to the sunshine and looked even more expansive. When I lived in that place, I was still in my video game Nintendo binge as you'll recall from Wednesday's post, but when I wasn't playing games, I wanted to go out into that backyard. I felt like I was staring into a wide open plain when I looked out the window there, just begging to be explored.
And explore it we did, my brother and I. We found all kinds of things to distract us in that backyard. Most of the space was clear and clean, but in the back were all kinds of treasures. There was a tool shed that came with the house where my father kept all his equipment. It was in front of that shed that him, my brother and I would play baseball and frisbee together. Behind the tool shed was perhaps the most bizarre find of all - a tiny shuffle board court! We have no idea why there was a shuffle board court, it was just there! With all of the objects needed to play it, no less. And we did indeed play it, sometimes. Behind the court, there was a ditch leading into the woods behind the house. We would often pass through a small opening on the right side and get our shoes dirty in the mud after rainstorms - I liked to pretend I was an adventurer uncovering unknown lands. Adorning the covering of the ditch were a wall of honey suckles - I always looked forward to getting to taste them every spring/summer.
In addition to the many fun places that were already there, in time our parents added other goodies that made our time in the yard even more exciting. One year, we helped our father (though he did most of the work) build us a tree house. It probably never got used very much now that I think about it, but I fondly remember keeping toys and games up there and having little "meetings" and hang-outs with friends. We even got a trampoline for that yard, which was perhaps the greatest thing ever given to us to play with. We bounced for hours and hours and hours. We did some crazy things on that trampoline - there were a few times where we sprayed water on it and had extra fun slipping and sliding as we bounced. In hind sight, that was an incredibly dumb thing to do and we could have gotten hurt easily; but hey, we were kids. Kids do dumb things, right? Our house never really became "the popular house" because of our backyard; we never had very many friends in that town. But I can recall one birthday where we had a lot of acquaintances over and every one of them wanted to jump on that trampoline forever. It was a really great feeling - it made me feel like our backyard was really special and that it had the potential to bring people together to play.
Pretty much every memory I have of that backyard is a happy one. I miss it all the time, but I'm glad I don't have a big backyard NOW. I really don't have time to be playing in the yard all the time anymore, so I suppose it's a bit bittersweet. Did you ever have a backyard that was really big, or did you know someone who did? Was there any kind of special thing about your backyard - any kind of thing that made you excited or filled you with wonder? That made it so you couldn't wait to go out and play? I'd love to hear about your own experiences. :)
About the Picture:
This picture only took a few days to come together (I usually only spend two hours max a day on drawing)........but it was a toughie. I knew from the start that I wanted this to be a scene picture - it's not just the characters in a white void, they're in an actual place. Unfortunately that meant I had to be more liberal with shadows and I picked a rather intricate set-up for shadows to play upon. There was no room to draw the sun, but I decided it's about directly overhead Doron (the one lying on top of the structure). The proportions of the tree aren't exactly right.........I think in the end it doesn't really make sense for there to be that many branches left above the tree house - surely most of them would have had to be cut down, right? To try and counter that, I would say that this is a very big tree; so try and imagine that the tree house is small and built in the middle of the tree, so it's almost hidden by the branches if you were to look at it from farther away. But it doesn't look like it has enough branches for that, does it, there's not enough thickness......oh well. It's very unprofessional for me to say these things - a truly good picture would speak for itself, but this is why I'm an amateur. Drawing the characters in their positions here was fun. Doron was the very first thing I drew. I've never drawn anything in that pose at that angle before, so I was super nervous it was going to take me many tries - but it actually came out perfect on the first sketch. I'm not one to brag most of the time, but I was very proud of myself for that. As a side note - this is not what the tree house from my old backyard looked like. I can't remember at all what that one looked like exactly, so the one in the picture was just designed in my head as I went. They all look a little old to be playing in a tree house, don't they...?
And that's it for Nostalgia Week! Thanks so much for sticking around and checking it out - the next update will be a return to "one-post" topics. But let me know what you thought about this themed week format. I'm definitely considering doing more of them in the future, so your feedback is appreciated! And if there are any precious memories from your childhood you'd like to share, feel free! =)
