my mommy cousin, kristy, recently told me how her girls needed some practice with their writing. i decided to make them each a little story card on a topic they had requested in passing last time i saw them.

emma, the cooky kid she is, asked for a picture of a desert. i’m guessing she has learned something in school, or on tv about deserts so her imagination is running wild.

as plain as deserts are, this was quite the challenge for me. as you’ll see below, drawing camels isn’t really my thing. i used 2 sheets of cardstock from michaels, my favourite black ink pens from dollarama, and plenty of pencil crayons. i started off with getting the basic shapes down and slowly filling them in with colour and some extra detail.

i wrote a little story about my camel, who i named clara. after having drawn her with 2 humps, i did some research and found out that the 2 hump camels apparently only live in china and mongolia, so i worked that in to the story. i had clara the camel go on a little adventure with her donkey friend into the mountains; i made sure to look up the animals who live in the area to be accurate (not that an 8 year old would know). this was just meant to be a starting point to get emma thinking about a kind of story she could write.

once the pieces were done, i stapled them together, licked the envelope shut and sealed it with a stamp. now i’m waiting to get some snail mail back from emma.

stay tuned for my snail mail to gracie!