Peanuts 2019

When my 21-year-old daughter was about 8, and my 17-year-old son was 4, I used an old overhead projector to make several Peanuts cartoon characters as our holiday decorations. I used 1/4″ seasoned plywood and the ‘kids’ went 2-up on each 8′ x 4′ board. So 2 ‘kids’ per sheet!

I penciled in the art from the overhead transparency and projector onto each board, used a scrollsaw I purchased for the project to cut a couple of inches past the outline and we were ready for painting. At that time both my daughter and son helped me paint the ‘kids’ as we call them, in the large garage we had at that time. I’d mix up the paint and then spot the color to be used in each area and the kids (my kids) would fill those areas in. We used an image from the Charlie Brown special where the Peanuts kids were skating on the ice of a pond, and we used the colors from the image on our boards.

As an artist I wanted to do a good job but wanted to do the paint using the simplest way, using only primary colors to mix for the colors needed on the kids. It was a challenge but fun too, and we only needed white, black, red, yellow, and blue!

For the next several years we only had the following ‘kids”:

• Charlie Brown
• Sally Brown
• Lucy van Pelt
• Linus van Pelt
• Snoopy and Woodstock
• Marcie

These were very popular by passers-by at our houses, first on Corwin Road south of Waynesville, then later on Port William and Gano Road north of I-71. But I had always wanted to do the entire Peanuts gang.

So a few years ago, I added:

• Schroeder
• Peppermint Patty
• “Pig-Pen”
• Franklin

For years I have had people stop by the house or reach out to me on Facebook to make them some characters of their own. But it is time-consuming and I have never done it. The biggest reason is I still want to finish the group, at least the group from the image I used to make them!

Anyhow, here’s to the start of the 2019 holiday season, and the Peanuts and Starnes families wish you a good one! Taking a single shot has always been a challenge to show the kids well, and not show the house or yard behind, so this year I took 3 shots and merged them into a single wide image…