Sledding Progression

I’ve done several dala horse drawings with little girls, so it was time to do one with the boys. Obviously they would be inclined toward innocent fun that their mother may not be aware of (aka mischief).

Once I decided to have a farm background for the intrepid sledders, I sketched in what I remembered of our old barn while I was growing up. The barn was around 100 years old; my great-grandpa built it after he moved here from Sweden in the late 1800’s, and it was the only barn until my dad built a bigger cow barn in the 70’s. As kids, we spent a lot of time in the old barn: the chickens were in possession main floor (and one of my chores was picking eggs every day), and the haymow was a frequent source of entertainment – it was a popular place for cats to have kittens, and we could build hay forts up there without getting in trouble. So I had a pretty good picture in my head of how the barn looked.

Of course, it wasn’t until I had basically finished the drawing that I dug through old photo albums to find an actual photograph of it. It turns out my memories from age 13 aren’t exactly accurate. I got the silos basically right, at least, and they’re roughly in the correct proportion to the barn. I just vastly misremembered my size (or rather the size of all the doors, windows and openings) in comparison to the size of the building itself.

So here we have photographs of the reality of the barn and a drawing of my memory of the barn. It’s funny how the two diverge over time.

Yep, that’s 13-year-old me on the left The Old Barn circa 2001

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