From the Vaults

Welcome to a very special edition of From the Vaults.  I think you'll like it.


When you move, you tend to find things you forgot you still had. I recently found a couple of childhood drawings.

So follow me, if you will, back in time to the early 1990s.  My brothers and I had these animal cards about the size of an old-school floppy disc (the big, slightly flexible ones, not the small, thick ones).

You don't... You don't know what I'm talking about?  Hmmm.  Ok, they were a little larger than a CD case.


The cards each featured a nice photograph of a specific animal, and then a bunch of information about the animal - what it was called, a world map colored to show where it lived, how big it got, what it ate, etc.  Pretty cool stuff, huh?

Although we started out with lots of them, we only had a few left at this point - who knows what happened to the rest.  We also had a bunch of light-colored, 3x5 paper.  Naturally, we decided to make our own animal cards!

So there we were, Steven, Ben and I, drawing animals and coloring them with crayons.  They were all made-up animals, of course - we colored them however we wanted and thought up names for them.  Then we had a few made-up facts that we wrote on the cards, as well.


I remember Steven discovered he was good at drawing birds of prey that were sitting on tree branches.  This launched a whole series of 'Stevenson Eagles' that looked pretty fantastic - sort of a cross between a realistic drawing of an eagle and what you'd expect to see in a Sunday comic.

Ben was the best at drawing animals, no surprises there.  He could draw any animal and make it look good.  I remember one of his in particular, a bear that he drew lying down.  It had one black paw.  I think I got Ben to draw the occasional animal for me to color and name, as well.


As the youngest, I was at a slight disadvantage.  Not only did my animals generally not look as realistic, but I did some strange things with the coloring and naming when we first started.  I got better later - I was especially proud of my Flying Hay Squirrel.  I could have sworn I still had that card, but I can't find it at the moment.  Here's what I did find:

The Indian Ocean Hi-Hena Whale

So, this is obviously one of my early cards.  The Indian Ocean Hi-Hena (hyena) Whale?  What?  Sigh.  Now, as I remember it, I colored this guy with the idea of him being a polka-dotted or bubble gum whale or something, and realized when I finished that it looked ridiculous.  I think calling it something I considered more sensible was supposed to counter-balance its appearance.

The Indian Ocean Hi-Hena Whale lives to be 90 years old and up to 8,550 feet, up to 2,000 tons, and eats fish and seaweed.  I think I made it so huge because I drew the ship too small.  I'm not sure what the thing under water is...a research camera?  Notice that, although I obviously knew about the blowhole, I did not realize this meant whales don't expel air from their mouths.


Yeah.  So that's the awkward one.  Next we have a non-traditional card.  I think this one is from the end of our interest in this activity.  I apparently traced a bunch of animals from a book (or had Ben trace them for me, more likely, based on the quality of the work), colored them, cut them out, taped them to a card, and simply named all the animals:

Ah, tracing paper...

So, we've got the Rain Bow Wail, the Slver Kangaroo, the Bleu Tailed Jack Rabbit, the Greenbelied Deer, the Brown Eread Elefant, the Rainbow Rinosoras, and the Rain Bow Platypous.

Oh dear.


I think that pretty much speaks for itself, lol.  If I find any more, I'll post them.  Ben, Steven?  Do you guys have any?