Retiring the Crown

While the good Lord has blessed me with many talents, apparently artistic ability is not one of them. Normally this would not pose a problem, in fact, it wouldn't even be known, to me or anyone else, but my current calling is leading the music in Primary, and it seems creating visual aids is part of the calling.

Early on I erroneously assumed that because they are children they wouldn't be very particular about the quality of the artwork--in fact, they would be forgiving of my halting attempts. Wrong. The first time I showed up with posters I'd illustrated and drawn myself, no one knew what the stick figures were supposed to be. Some of the teachers snickered.

I gave up on creating visuals myself and decided to buy them. Thankfully there is a thriving industry of psuedo-Mormon "art" for Primary, so for $9.95 plus tax I had visuals for an entire year.

These particular ones have to be colored first. No problem--coloring in the lines doesn't require artistic skill. Once again, wrong.

I finshed the set of visuals for a new song we were learning this past weekend. No matter how I looked at it, every picture looked like the winner of the Miss Jesus 2008 Drag Queen Pagaent. Too late to redo things, I figured the kids wouldn't notice if I just held the pictures up with a smile and acted like they were perfectly normal. Wrong.

Before we could even begin the song, a little girl halfway back raised her hand. "Um, did your kids color those pictures? 'Cause they're really bad." There went the remnants of my ego.

But she wasn't done. After church she followed me outside. "I have a suggestion for you," she said. "I think maybe you should let your kids color the pictures, 'cause it would probably be better than if you do it." OUCH! I asked if she realized how young my kids are. We're still in scribble mode at our house--apparently that includes me. She pondered that. "Well, then maybe I could color them for you. Or maybe we could just learn songs without any pictures."

Sigh.