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Wahoo - The Board Game

I’ve been telling you about my Granny and Pa, as well as using their portrait to illustrate some photo to line art techniques. I’m working on one final article in the line art series which will tie these all togeather. Until then, let me share with you a game that I played as a child. We called it “Marbles” but most people know it as “Wahoo.” I spent many hours playing this game as a child. I hope that you can find as much pleasure in it as I did.

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Wahoo - The Marble Game

Materials:
Wooden Game Board
4 like colored marbles per player
Set of Dice (NOTE: only one [1] die is used for the game play)

	Set up: Each player starts with four marbles of the same color or pattern, chooses one of the diagonal rows of holes, also known as the holding space, and places the four marbles in the holes.
	Start: Each player gets a turn to roll one dice. In order to move a marble into play, the player must roll a one (1) or a six (6) in order to start. Upon rolling a one or a six, the player can move one marble into the starting position (the first hole in the third, left most column across from his marbles. If the player doesn’t have a marble in play, and he doesn’t roll a one or a six, he forfeits his move.
	Play: Once the player has at least one marble in play on the board, he can roll the die and advance his marble the number of spaces indicated. If he rolls a one (1) or a six (6), he can play again, otherwise, he must hand the die to the player on his left (clockwise). A player can jump his opponents marbles, and if he advances the number of spaces indicated and finds an opponents piece occupying the target space, he can send his opponent’s piece back to the holding space (diagonal line). If, however, a player’s own marble is in front of the marble he wants to move, he can not jump his own piece. He can only move his marbles if there are sufficient spaces between the marble he wants to move and the marble in front of it. If a player finds that he can not meet these conditions, he forfeits his turn.
	Special Note: Note: If a player has a marble on the corner and rolls a six (6), he may jump directly across to the next corner. (Note: Once landing on corner, he can not move his marble any more spaces; for this special case, jumping the corner constitutes moving the six [6] spaces indicated.)
	Winning the Game: To win the game, a player must successfully move all four of his marbles into play, advance them around the playing board, and return them to the “home” position, which is the middle row adjacent on the left to the holding area. The rule about not jumping one’s own pieces applies here, so the marbles must be moved into place, on the home row, in the order which they appear on the board. Once all four marbles are “home”, the player wins.

I have been doing a series of articles about line art. In my first article, I spoke about how to use the graphics editing software to convert a photo into line art. The second article gave you a list of programs and techinques that would save you literally hundreds of dollars in licensing fees while simultaneously giving you the power of professional graphics programs. Now, I would like to show you step by step how I used the GIMP to create a line art drawing of my grandparents.

First, as I took the portrait and scanned it, creating a digited version. To do this, I selected TWAIN from the GIMP menu (File…Acquire).

After the picture was scanned, I used Vidar Madsen’s method described in the GIMPy high pass filter sketch effect tutorial. Vidar shows you how to use the gaussian blur filter, merge opacity, desaturate the colors, then clean up the lines using desaturation. The results were ok, but nothing to write home about. I found a Photoshop plugin called Cleanup which might have made it more useable; however, I could not get it to work with the GIMP.

Next, decided to start from scratch and try to render the line art by hand by “tracing” it from the photo. Melissa Clifton wrote an excellent tutorial about this technique on her website. I created a blank layer (Layer…Duplicate Layer), set the opacity at 50% (Dialogs…Layer…Opacity slider bar), and started drawing using mostly the pencil brush to draw the graphic. Once the drawing was done, I had a little fun and colored it in, making look as though it came from a graphic novel.

I wasn’t happy with the initial results because the details of the face were very unrefined. For example, in my initial drawing, Pa looked like he had alien eyes, and his mouth was all wrong. Granny’s eyes were roughly drawn as well. To fix it, I erase the insides of the faces and started over again. The second time, I experimented with different brushes. For example, I found the pressure brush with a medium or small splatter point worked best for the details. I also took my time. The first go around, I finished in a couple of nights, but when I started over again, I went took approximately a month just to redo the faces. It was worth the wait, though, as I am much more pleased with the results.

All in all, I would consider this a pleasant experience. When I was very little, I remember sitting on my grandparents’ laps, touching their faces and looking into their eyes. Nothing short of having them back could replace that memory, but this was the next best thing. Staring at the photograph, I was able to capture all of the lines of wisdom, all of the smiles, all of the worries, all of the love that gave charactor to two people who will forever hold a special place in my heart.

Now, go enjoy your family and make the world a better place by working on some photo family memories of your own.
Your Fellow “Creative Genius ” ,
Texaiano

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When I was young, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, especially before I was old enough to go to school. Staying with Pa and Granny was the start of my love of photography. Since the family was spread out, Granny loved getting pictures, so much so that she put every single picture on her front wall. It was covered with pictures, most without frames. Granny used whatever was handy to pin or tack the pictures on the wall. I would sit and stare at the pictures and ask questions about the relatives, as well as seeking out the ones that I was in. It became a kind of game to see if I could point to the pictures and tell each person, where they lived and my relationship to them.

One year, Granny and Pa had their picture taken at one of the local photography studios. I don’t know how many pictures they bought for the family, but I do remember the framed 8X10 portrait that hung in the top left hand corner of the living room, between the gas heater and a small end table. I don’t have any good pictures of them so when I saw it hanging in a relative’s house, I asked if I could scan it. Now, here it is digitized for the world to enjoy.

How I cherish those times when I was a boy. I remember my Granny, a short farm woman, would get up every morning and make my Grandpa and me a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, buttermilk, orange juice, biscuits and gravy - for Pa, it was sweet-milk gravy (known to some people as Red-Eye gravy or white gravy), but for me, the house specialty - chocolate gravy! Yumm! It makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

After breakfast, we would go outside and I would play while my grandparents did yard work. Granny and Pa, having moved to the “city” from the country, remained true to their upbringing and turned their yard into a veritable Eden. There were peach and apricot trees, rose bushes, green onion plants, holleyhocks, honeysuckle, grapes, and raspberry vines. When they moved to town, Pa brought along a large sandstone rock that he placed in his yard and filled every day with water for the cats. Sometimes they would sit on the porch and watch the cars go by while I made mudpies. I would take water from the rock and mix it with dirt in Granny’s old butter bowls which I would then put in the trees to “bake”. In the afternoon, we would all take a nap then go back outside for more playing and car watching. Sometimes Pa and I would go out back to his tool shed. I’m never sure what he did in there, because he never made anything that I remember, but he had a bunch of old tools and nails and stuff that he would arrange and clean. While he did that, I would play with my Tonka tractors. Once in a while, Granny would get out her “marble” board and dice and we would play a game of “Wahoo.” (The board wasn’t made of marble, rather it was made of wood and used to play a game of marbles.) In the evening, it was back to the porch for car watching, and sometimes a snack of cookies and milk or biscuits soaked in buttermilk.

I count myself to be the luckiest of the grandkids. My dad was the youngest in his family, so all of my cousins were older. My siblings, who came along after my Dad remarried, didn’t have very many years with Granny and Pa before Pa died and Granny’s alzheimers made her into a different person. I don’t know if any of the older cousins got to know then the same way that I did because they all lived in different towns and didn’t get so see them as much. My Grandpa had a heart problem that caused him to be hospitalized over Christmas vacation my freshman year in high school. Since I was old enough to stay with him and since I was out of school, I got to keep him company all week. I don’t think anyone else of my generation was ever able to spend such quality time with him.

Many pictures. Many memories. If you don’t have a good picture of your family, I encourage you to go get one. In the very least, get someone to take a snapshot. Years from now, your family will thank you for it.

Your Fellow “Creative Genius ” ,
-Texaiano

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