Domestic Derring-Do: Gnome for the Holiday

For our

anniversary, Chuck and I decided to buy each other a gnome. We have been steadily building our collection, tentatively at first because of our first experience with populating our property. But now we know to secure all known gnomes and use signage to remind people we do, in fact, have large dogs on the property.

So we’ve happily been adding to our collection, aided by friends, and when we passed a store with this fellow sitting outside, well, we couldn’t resist.

Then the dilemma became whether or not to paint him.

I know there is something very dramatic and earthy about leaving him gray. I can imagine moss or lichens or really organic stuff growing on him and giving him character.

But…

Remember during the sixties when Disney Wonderful World of Color came on the television? There it was: the Disneyland Castle with Tinkerbell flying around splashing color all over the place. My mother would sigh and say, “Wouldn’t this be lovely in color?” and then turn on something else because we didn’t get a color television until 1970. When every year we watched The Wizard of Oz on television my parents would describe to us about how pretty the movie was when Dorothy opened the door to the land of Oz and suddenly everything was in color, a feature we were missing because we were seeing it in black and white.

I blame this color depravation with my preference for things being in color. I may admire the texture and nuances of the halftones, but really I’m just waiting for the door to open and to see the beauty of color.

And so I painted our gnome.

It was a pretty mundane task until I got to the face. The beard really needed enhancement. And then there were the eyes.

Eyes are always a challenge because if you get th

em wrong you end up with