Commitment to the Craft

Let me tell you a story.

Last weekend, after picking my daughter up from daycare, we came home and she immediately started working on her new drawing project. She wanted to create a Crash Bandicoot book. If you don't know who Crash is, he is a video game superstar. This is what he looks like.

My daughter loves playing the video games which, I admit, are pretty silly and fun. When you conquer certain levels in the game, you are rewarded with "extras" (think DVD extras). In this case, it was a storyboard of the game, panel by panel. For each level you conquered, you would get a new storyboard panel. These panels all looked hand-drawn by pencil.

This is where my daughter's creativity kicked in. She wanted to draw all of these panels and make a book to tell the story of Crash's journey to victory. Now I thought this project might just last an hour or so, but it didn't. She worked on it all night long. In fact, I fell asleep around 11 p.m. or so and she was still working!

The next day, while I read and puttered around the apartment, she still continued to work. She would play a level of the game, get the next storyboard, and draw it. This went on from 10 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. when I finally decided we both needed to get out of the house! After we went grocery shopping, we came home, ate supper, and then she went right back to it. Play the game, draw the panel. Play the game, draw the panel.

Sunday morning brought church and my little miss didn't want to go because she wanted to work on her project. I assured her she would have the rest of the day to do that. And that is exactly what she did.

Finally, she finished all her drawings and I am not kidding when I say she had done around 50 of them. Coloring came next. She got out her colored pencils, matched the colors up to what was on the video game, and dove in. By bedtime, she wasn't done and wanted desperately to stay up late so she could finish it. I couldn't grant her wish since she had school the next day, but as soon as she got home from school on Monday, she set to work on it again and finished it.

She is so proud of her finished product. And I am in awe of her complete dedication and focus. She is only 9! Yet she could teach us all a lesson in commitment to our craft.