Turkey Traditions

Annual family traditions are not easy to establish and maintain over an extended length of time, however my father and I have an 18-year old ritual of painting a watercolor every Thanksgiving day. We created our first turkey watercolor in 1995 when I was only 11 years old and that began our annual process of creative story-telling, illustration and pure teamwork painting watercolors depicting a marvelous story about turkeys in our modern world. 

 Why? Because we believe that family traditions such as doing a piece of artwork together has meaning, creates a long-lasting memory and is completely fun!

Our saga began when our turkeys were being carried off to the slaughter house, but chose to take control of their ill-fate, and thus the adventures began...

My dad's and my turkeys have taken on hobbies that our meaningful in our own lives.

There was chaos on Pennsylvania Ave in 2003, when our flocks protested No Turkey Left Behind. 

In 2005, our turkeys survived the disastrous Hurricane Katrina!

Here I am illustrating our turkey tribute to Norman Rockwell's famous Thanksgiving painting.

In 2004, our turkeys traveled with me to Florence Italy, where they too studied classical art.

In 2008, Turkey-bama was elected as the first feathered president of the United States!

How do my dad and I paint these when we live in two different cities and can’t get together for Thanksgiving? We found an answer to that problem a couple of years ago when I left my family in Colorado and moved to Seattle: 

We first come up with an idea, sketch it out and email each other with feedback. My dad then blocks out the drawing in light pencil on watercolor paper and mails me the paper from Denver along with the original watercolor set that we’ve always used. I then paint the watercolor in Seattle and mail the completed artwork back to my dad for final “touchup” and scanning. Its that easy!

Inspired by Dorthea Lange's emotional sepia photographs from the Great Despression,  we created this painting to convey the Recession of 2009.

2012 Turkeys on Mars. Well, this year has been a memorable year for our turkeys. This is the “mockup sketch” for the 2012 watercolor celebrating the historic NASA mars rover mission, the retiring of the space shuttle and Felix Baumgartner’s 5-mile leap from space. I’ll post the final painting soon!