Sunday (29th) was my 30th birthday. I received some emails from friends and family and spoke with Mum & Dad, Nan & Grandad and the I’Anson family on skype. It was the first time I’d seen Sandra, Justin & Amy since we left Australia in ’09 and the first time I’d seen Micah since he was born. That was definitely the highlight of the day for me – even if Sandra did get stage fright and didn’t really know what to say 
A few weeks ago Cathryn asked me what I wanted for my birthday. Nothing came to mind. Since I got my kindle last year in November I’ve been happy on the gadget front – I even gave Cathryn the iPod Touch and went back to using the small ipod that’s about 4 years old.
After some more thought, I was inspired by something I’d seen on the internet where a guy had painted a wall sized mural of Calvin & Hobbes in his kids bedroom. We moved into our new place a few months back and it’s quite a bit larger than our old place and comes with less wall art so the walls are looking a bit bare. Despite the obvious value that a full sized Calvin & Hobbes mural would add to this apartment, I decided that it probably wasn’t worth the fuss. Instead, I asked my incredibly talented wife to paint me a series of paintings I call the 4 seasons of Calvin & Hobbes
While I was away on business a week or two ago, Cathryn went to the art store and got 4 medium sized canvases. Then I went looking for suitable images to use. Unfortunately we have no Calvin & Hobbes books here. So I got a kind soul to send me some high-res scans from the covers and splash pages of some of the books. From these images I chose 4 and my beautiful wife went to work.
Day 1 – Pencil Outlines
Cathryn spent the first few hours sketching out the outlines of the images onto the canvases and the results can be seen here:
Cathryn doesn’t realy get Calvin & Hobbes. To her it’s just another kids comic strip. She can’t understand why my whole family likes it so much. There is no Korean translation available that I can find, but maybe one day soon I’ll sit her down and read it together with her. At the moment, she can see how much I like the paintings and she is doing a fantastic job.
More to come tomorrow.
Happy birthday! Welcome to the 30+ club
-c