Circus Clowns

The office where I work held their annual employee appreciation lunch and celebration last week. I am the office’s self-appointed head party decorator. This year’s party was done in a circus/carnival theme. While surfing the net for ideas we discovered a site that sold these posters for $150 each.

We are a state government office that has to work within a strict budget for this annual event and spending that much money on one item was beyond our limits. So I, being the adventurous copy-cat, said that I was sure I could make them for very little money.

I started out thinking that I would use the clown clip art as a guide to painting it onto cardboard. I began by going to my favorite appliance store. The minute I stepped across the threshold I realized that I should have been wearing horse blinders to keep from getting distracted by the wonderful new stoves, refrigerators and microwaves. I don't even like spending time in my kitchen but all that shinning, gleaming enamel and stainless steel insisted that linger -- but I managed to get all the way to the back counter where I asked if they had an empty refrigerator box that I could have. They did, and I went home to begin my project.

I enlarged the clip art clown and used PowerPoint to print out all the different pieces to complete the clown in black and white. As I was contemplating on what should be the next step it occurred to me that I was working too hard. If I were to print out the clowns in color I wouldn’t need to paint them and take the chance of them not looking quite as good as they could. Of course, stretching a clip art piece that much caused each pixel to be the size of a dime but surprisingly they didn’t look too bad as long as you were right up close to them. I used some black paint to give the outlines a little more definition.

Here are a couple of my co-workers enjoying the final product.