After moving from texas to Michigan, our family ended up living for a time in an apartment, with my “shop” living in a trailer stored on the other side of town. Fortunately (unfortunately?) the apartment complex had a big roll-off dumpster not far from our unit, and on occasion I would “rescue” objects that caught my eye. One such item was a ⅜” thick, bean-shaped glass desk top. I cleaned it up and told my son we could draw different ideas on it with dry-erase markers, and if we got an idea we really liked, we could paint it on the back side of the glass. A couple of months went by, and variety of things were sketched and erased. Lots of ideas, but nothing really captivating. Then one day my son brought home a stencil drawing he had done at school as part of a lesson on the Lunar New Year; a flying dragon. He suggested it would be a cool thing to draw on the glass top, and so for the next month or so we tried and refined different ideas until we (or at least I) was satisfied with the concept. Then, for the next couple of weeks, I would carefully flip the glass over during the day and paint inside the marker lines I could see through the glass. Illustration/paint/2D art aren’t really things I’ve ever tended to, and while I am under no illusion that the end result is terribly remarkable in any way, it was a super fun chance to think about a design in a different way (painting foreground first and working outwards to the background is weird). It’s also always good to recognize that, when the stakes are so low, you’d be stupid not try something that doesn’t make any sense. After all, it’s only somebody else’s trash.