Hello everyone! Get out your crayons and pens because today is Drawing Tuesday!
Well, whenever I think of circuses, I think of those clever bears who learn all kinds of tricks – like riding bicycles and dancing and juggling. So I decided to draw a juggling bear:
I added the seals, because a good seal trick is clapping their flippers together – and every juggling bear needs a receptive audience.
Matthew wrote this little story about him:
His name was Bruce but they called him Papa Constantine because his chest was shaggy and his countenance solemn and he did the most marvelous tricks.
You’ve gotta love a bear named Bruce (who’s called Papa Constantine).
What is your favorite part of the circus? Draw a picture and have your mom or dad post it to the comments.
We’ve also just added Instagram, so if you’d rather, you can have your parents take a picture of your drawing and post it to Instagram using #bobbledycircus and it will appear over in the sidebar on our Instagram feed. Easy peasy!
ALSO: this week’s auction is a little special – I didn’t color in the balls (or even draw all of them) because I thought that the person who wins the auction can have some special custom message added in – the balls can spell out someone’s name or initials or even a message that says “I love bears!”… whatever you want! So head on over to ebay and put your bid in. And remember – we’ll choose one submission for the week to win a trophy (a flimsy, two-dimensional one) and a small archival print of the Papa Constantine, so show us what you’ve got in the comments (or on Instagram, now!).
Happy art-making!
Simon and Everett, taking some liberties with the instructions, made a dinosaur circus using cut-out paper. Left to right: “Tylosaurus jumping through a fired hoop”, “Apatosaurus walking the tightrope”, and “Argentinosaurus balancing a ball on his nose”.
THIS. IS. SIMPLY. AWESOME.
It would be VERY funny to see an apatosaurus trying to walk a tightrope – that long neck probably makes it VERY hard to balance. And I must confess, I had to look up Tylosaurus to see if it was a real dinosaur and not some dinosaur you made up and named after your neighbor Tyler. The best part about the Tylosaurus jumping through the flaming hoop is that you either had to get the hoop to be on fire underwater or you had to get the Tylosaur to jump out of the water to go through the hoop! You’ve got excellent dinosaur-taming (or hoop-lighting) skills, it seems! Hooray for dinosaur circus!!!
Phoebe and Thalia made their own circus! It’s called The Swirly Whirly Circus, (a.k.a. Another Snow Day Circus) and it has three performing seals on stools – Lulu, Lola, and Loopsy – plus a new baby seal named Fluffy who likes to stay in the seal pool with her mother Rainbow. Phoebe made the seal pool out of clay, waited for it to dry, and painted it. The two lions are named Whistle and Shaggy. Shaggy is bigger, on the tiger cage, and Whistle is with the seals, probably teaching them how to whistle. The tiger is named Stripey, because, Thalia explains, the tiger has stripes. The elephant is named Pinky and she is giving her next move a bit of thought; she would like to try the tight rope but is not sure she can swing herself up by her trunk. The ringmaster, the clowns, and all the people have gone to Florida to find a warm circus. But the animals have nice fur coats and thick skin, so they stayed to perform in the winter.
tiger cage
seal pool (with Rainbow and Fluffy)
animal acrobats
Pinky the conflicted elephant
Phoebe & Thalia!!! Your circus is AMAZING! Thank goodness for snow days, because otherwise this awesome circus might never have come to be! I love the story about the circus animals toughing out the winter while all the humans go off to Florida. Also: Pinky the conflicted elephant seems like he needs a whole book written about her. Also: the festive patterned backdrop gives the whole thing just the right amount of CIRCUS, as does the silver fringe around the stage. However, I would warn you against trying to keep Stripey contained in a berry pint box – he may be all agreeable now, but tigers are sneaky and if he really wants to, he’ll get out. Perhaps Whistle can teach the seals to sound the whistle alarm if Stripey decides to break out.