What Shall We Do Now?, Dorothy Canfield Fisher [ebook offline reader .txt] 📗

(Facing page 266)

Or if you get tired of living near the Arctic circle you can sweep your table clean of Esquimau dwellings and construct a Filipino village. For these you do not need bricks (which can be given a rest and put away in a box) but little splints of wood the same size and length which you can make yourself with a knife. Make a little thin floor of damp clay (but drier than you use it to model with) and stick your upright pieces in this in the shape of the house you wish to make. When the clay has hardened they are held quite firm and you can make a wattled hut by weaving long straws or grasses in and out to form your walls. A thatched roof can also be made of long grasses, tied in little bunches and laid close together all sloping down from the ridge-pole. Almost every magazine of a few years back has in it pictures of Filipino villages which will furnish you with models to copy. According to the size of the table or board on which you make your settlements you can have more or less extensive tropical country, surrounding your village. Mountains can be made of the clay, covered with moss or grasses to represent the jungle and a river with overhanging trees arranged with bits of broken looking-glass, and twigs with tiny scraps of green tissue paper glued to them for leaves. The exercise of your own ingenuity in using all sorts of unlikely materials which you will find all about you is the best part of this game.

After you have decided to change the climate and character of your village, the clay used may be broken up and put back in your jar, wet again, stirred smooth and is all ready to begin again. Great care should be taken that it is kept clean, that bits of wood or glass be not left in it, or you may cut or prick your fingers in handling it.

You cannot only wander from one climate and from one nationality to another, but from one century to another. If you are studying early American history nothing is more fun than to make a street in an old Dutch settlement. Your bricks are painted red for this. Almost any history-book will have pictures of one or two old Dutch houses which will show you the general look of them. They are harder to construct than the ruder huts of savages and may need to be held together with a little use of damp clay. It is interesting to try and reconstruct old Dutch Manhattan, from the maps and pictures, showing the bay and the walk on the Battery.

Or if you are interested in Colonial New England, make a settlement of log-houses with the upper story overhanging the first. On any walk you can pick up enough small sticks to use as logs after trimming and measuring.

Other possibilities in this line are suggested below. You will have more fun in working them out yourself than if you are told just how to proceed. A Roman arena with gladiators fighting and a curtain which may be drawn to keep off the sun. A little fishing-village beside the sea (a large pan of water) with tiny nets spread out to dry and little walnut shell boats drawn up on the sandy beach.

A farmhouse, barn, pig-pen, dog-kennel, carriage-house and the like. A very pretty settlement can be made of this with fields of growing grain, brooks, water-wheels, etc.

All the animals of a farm can be modeled and painted. When they are skilfully made they are very pretty and add much to the picture and when they are done unskilfully it is fun to have people guess what they were meant for. However, with a little practice very presentable animals can be modeled. It is easier to make them in clay than to draw them.

A gypsy camp, with tents and open fires (bits of yellow and red tissue-paper), under a black kettle (made of clay and painted) swung on a forked stick, can easily be made.

Of course with tin or lead soldiers the number of games one can invent with these tiny settlements is innumerable. One favorite with some children is the attack and capture of the Filipino village by American troops. Sometimes it is burned, and this is always a stirring spectacle. Indeed with tin soldiers (which are just now unjustly out of favor) one's range of subjects is unlimited, and one always has plenty of inhabitants for any settlement. An army post can be made, with a fort and barracks and a wide green parade ground with the regiment drawn up in line for dress-parade. A tiny American flag flutters from the flag-pole and after the sunset gun booms (a fire-cracker exploded or only some one striking a blow on a tin pan) it can be lowered to the ground while the best whistler of the company executes "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Painting is an occupation which is within almost everybody's power, and of which one tires very slowly or perhaps not at all. By painting we mean coloring old pictures rather than making new ones, since making new ones—from nature or imagination—require separate gifts. On a wet afternoon—or, if it is permitted, on Sunday afternoon—coloring the pictures in a scrapbook is a very pleasant and useful employment. After dark, painting is not a very wise occupation, because, in an artificial light, colors cannot be properly distinguished.

All shops that sell artists' materials keep painting-books. But old illustrated papers do very well.

An even more interesting thing to do with a paint-box is to make a collection of the flags of all nations. And when those are all done, you will find colored pages of them in any large dictionary, and elsewhere too,—you might get possession of an old shipping guide, and copy Lloyd's signal code from it.

Coloring maps is interesting, but is more difficult than you might perhaps think, owing to the skill required in laying an even surface of paint on an irregular space. The middle of the country does not cause much trouble, but when it comes to the jagged frontier line the brush has to be very carefully handled. To wet the whole map with a wet brush at the outset is a help. Perhaps before starting in earnest on a map it would be best to practice a little with irregular-shaped spaces on another piece of paper.

If you have a magic lantern in the house you can paint some home-made slides. The colors should be as gay as possible. The best home-made slides are those which illustrate a home-made story; and the fact that you cannot draw or paint really well should not discourage you at all. A simpler way of making slides is to hold the glass over a candle until one side is covered with lamp black and then with a sharp stick to draw outline pictures on it.

Another way is to cut out silhouettes in black paper, or colored tracing-paper, and stick them to the glass. In copying a picture on a slide put the glass over the picture and draw the outline with a fine brush dipped in Indian ink. Then paint. All painting on slides should be covered with fixing varnish, or it will rub off.

As a change from painting there is illuminating, for which smaller brushes and gold and silver paint are needed. Illuminating texts is a favorite Sunday afternoon employment.

There is also pen and ink drawing, mistakenly called "etching," for which you require a tiny pen, known as a mapping pen, and a cake of Indian ink. If the library contains a volume of old wood-cuts, particularly Bewick's Birds or Bewick's Quadrupeds, you will have no lack of pictures to copy.

In place of paints a box of chalks will serve very well.

Smaller children, who have not yet learned to paint properly, often like to trace pictures either on tracing paper held over the picture, or on ordinary thin paper held over