Everything She Can Do, I Can Do Better...

...She Can Do Everything Better Than Me.

(I know, those aren't the actual words to that song, I had to adjust them to fit our process.)

I was really liking the almost graphic novel feel of the painting I had started.  It had a sort of edge to the lines. Apparently, mom, never having done a self portrait before, forgot that we weren't exactly doing portraits.  She thought some of the lines I'd created made her look mean and skeletal.  So she took this...

...and turned it into this.

OK, not bad, if the goal were to paint portraits of our 20 years younger Disney selves.
Too harsh?  But look what she did to my precious lines! This was not heading in the direction either of us had originally intended, but mom was pretty pleased with it at this point. So what to do?

Well, there were a couple of options; A. Disregard our original plan and just go with this, completing the painting as a portrait of how we always feel younger than our years, or
B. As mom is fond of saying to me, "Just let go of it, you can always paint it again."
I love it when she says that.  It's like telling someone who gets laid off a week before retirement, "You can always start a new career."  OK, it's not quite like that, but it feels like that sometimes.

The decision to let go of it and try to move it back into the original direction was difficult because mom was as attached to this as I was to my "mean, skeletal" lines.  So I took the painting back and proceeded to...ugh...

...really screw it up.  What's the term my uncle used to use? FUBAR?

Well, if we were not doing this collaborative project, I may have been tempted at this point to just chuck it, Gesso over the whole thing and start over.  However, as this was exactly the kind of thing this project involves, I instead carried that canvas back to mom and asked her if she could  "Please do something."

Meanwhile, I'd been changing a few things on the painting she had started.  The main obstacle there was that while it was one thing to hand my painting over to her, it was quite another thing to take her painting over myself.  I was afraid of messing something up, or not being able to add anything useful.  Actually, I did find some colors that wanted changing, some shadows that were needed, and a way to include flowers, which were an integral part of the story the painting is telling.  We were both pretty happy with it in the end.

(I like that in this second photo you can see mom struggling with the mess I'd created.)

Later that night, I got a call from mom, saying that she'd saved the painting.

I couldn't wait to get over there to see what she had done.