July 4th Doodle

4th of July Doodle!! Happy Independance Day 2010!!

As many of you may already know I’m so into this 30 days of doodles. It’s really becoming quite fun and a bit challenging. It seems the farther I go into it the more detailed and complicated the doodles become. I haven’t a clue what the psychology is behind that.

But I can tell you what is behind my 4th of July Doodle. When I was living up on a mountain with my family many years ago we had the most amazing 4th of July Celebrations. My dad had a special recipe for hamburgers that melted in your mouth and had all sorts of ingredients from garlic to celery, mushrooms(sometimes) and onions. You never knew what secret ingredient he would put into them next. They were always cooked over an open wood fire from a hand built stone pit from mountain rocks. The wood was always collected for weeks in advance from downed limbs in the surrounding forest.

Other staples were watermelon, beans, waldorf salad, potato chips, occasionally hotdogs, and of course potato salad. And we also always roasted marshmallows. The really cool thing about these July 4th celebrations was that when the sun went down you could see the entire north Shenandoah Valley from Strasburg to Berryville. Of course it depended upon where you stood. So basically we saw fireworks displays sometimes all the way to Winchester. I have to say it was really cool and not nearly as noisy.

My addition to this was always the traditional All American Flower arrangement. I would try to find red white and blue from what was growing up along the driveway. Usually it was Queen Anne’s lace, bachelor’s buttons, red clover. Sometimes there would be daisies or one of grandma’s red roses if the timing was right.

When I was working on a project for my design class the other night I had this idea of putting the statue of liberty on a dark sky in front of a huge flag and then using those three flowers in some way. As I was putting it together I suddenly realized that the flowers looked just like fireworks. How cool is that. So I put together a composite of the photo’s I had collected for the class project and this became the sketch for the doodle I did. So here is my 4th of July doodle. Enjoy!