Magical Leg Splints

For a while now, my daughter has been wearing leg splints, which means they’ll turn up in my sketches, just like all the ‘doing homework’ sketches make a regular appearance. I’ve been sketching her of course, but I wasn’t sure she was okay with my drawing her splints (she didn’t see why not when I asked).

Here is Brian making casts for her splints. I expected a long process with Plaster of Paris and a long casting time involved. But this was quick: fiber glass wrapped around her leg like gauze that hardened into shape in under 2 minutes… too quick for anything but the quickest capture.

Those splints are quite a work of art: the more I draw them the better I understand them. They fit her whole foot, toe to calf, like a glove (but made from a hard plastic), and she wears them everywhere.

Sometimes without socks, like below, but mostly with really colorful patterned socks that I need to draw sometime.

One day the splints will be gone (and we’ll all be so happy when her foot issue is fixed) but there will be these sketches to remember the splints phase. Which made me think of how much sketching means to me: a way to record the everyday and to understand complex things. That understanding takes looking very closely. And when you look closely, even seemingly mundane stuff is pretty amazing. Like the magic of how Brian made those splint casts and how those splints ( with a lot of physical therapy, and hard work from my daughter and the team that works with her) are going to fix those legs, pretty soon.