Shining Star

Well, after five long months of waiting, Troy’s name finally got picked for the Shining Star. Unlike I predicted, he was not, in fact, picked last. He was picked second to last. His sharing board has literally been done for two months. And over that time, I have had to watch as kid after kid has shared their life story with their classes, while me and my son have impatiently waited for his turn. But the wait was finally over today.

It seemed to me that the first couple of Shining Star boards took quite a bit of time to put together detail-oriented presentations. Some looked like professional scrapbookers had worked on them. But as time went on, the boards got sparser and less imaginative. In fact, during the mission trip, I spoke to several parents who said that they’d forgotten about it and had thrown something together literally the night before. That is not how Troy’s board came together.

It started with the fact that Troy wanted a black poster board instead of white, which I think really made the pictures pop. Then, he and I had a discussion about the aspects of his personality that he wanted to share with the world. I combed through countless photographs to pick the ones that aligned with his vision while also aligning with my artistic flair. Next, we had to find a way to represent his artistic side, so we painted an abstract picture together across the front of the poster board to serve as the background. And then, I had to come up with a design.

The creative process took several iterations over several weeks. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew that I’d know it when I saw it. It had to be something different, something fresh from all of the other designs. So, I was constantly watching the other kid’s ideas to make sure that I didn’t recreate what they’d done. A few colored the background as well, but it was with markers and was generally a single color. None of them had an original abstract painting! I had to pare down the number of photographs as well, which was an excruciating process. There are too many awesome picture of Troy…I love them all! And of course, everyone had their opinion as to the best ones to include. But you can’t please everyone, and in the end, I went with my gut.

When I finally decided on which photos to use, I ran into another issue. You couldn’t see the painting in the background, because the pictures completely covered it up. I pondered the problem for several days before I decided to cut around the main subjects, removing parts (but not all) of the background in each photo. This not only allowed more of the background to show through between the photos, but also gave the photos an almost 3-D appearance. This was the unique direction I had been looking for. Nobody else had thought of this style. After that, things finally started to click. The layout began to take shape, and the photos were mounted on the board. But I wasn’t done quite yet. My wife made one more off-handed comment about wanting dinosaurs walking across the top of the poster board.

Between you and me (and everyone else that stumbles across this blog post), I thought the suggestion was ludicrous and an affront to my artistic vision. But I wanted her to have a stake in the project too, so I pondered it some more. How could I encompass her vision while saving my own? And that’s when it hit me…not dinosaurs, but animals! Troy keeps saying that he wants to work with animals and be a zoologist, so why not incorporate that aspect of his personality too?! So, I scoured the internet for the prefect photographs of different animals and subtly added them around the board, focusing mainly on blue animals, so they’d better blend into the background (except for the snake, which was yellow and black to match his shirt in the main photo). There was a snake, a lizard, a butterfly, a bee, a beetle, a crab, and some feathers. Some of them crossed over the edge of the board into space, like the snake slithering behind the board and over the corner or the crab hanging off the edge by a pincer. Some interacted with the photos, like the butterfly covering part of a photo or the lizard standing on Troy’s name. And with that, it was finally done.

All in all, I still think he had the best board to show off. In fact, I want to hang it on the wall when he brings it home, because it’s just that cool to look at. And I’m not just biased (okay, I might be a little), but it’s seriously an amazing board. The finished product was even better than I had originally imagined. I’m very proud of it. But more importantly, Troy was very proud of it.