Parents, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. One that cut the whining in my household down dramatically.

I have become the dungeon master of my own multiplayer campaign. But, instead of leading a band of adventurers to slay monsters in bloodthirsty battles, I'm leading the family into a war against household dirt. That’s where Chore Wars comes in. Chore Wars lets you claim points for household chores. By getting other people in your house or workplace to sign up, you can assign point rewards for individual tasks and chores. Even if you’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons or any other role-playing game, it’s fun — and productive — to rack up points competing against roommates, co-workers, or, in my case: the kiddos. It’s a great motivator. The whining has decreased and one of them has even been getting up early to claim all the points for emptying the dishwasher! Win-win!

Here's how you do it:

The setup. Go to the site and set up an account. You will be the admin (in our case, both Paul and I are admins, which means we can set up new chores/assign points/etc.) Go have fun making up a character for yourself. There are several settings you can choose, depending on how public or private you'd like your group to be. Ours is private, but if you were doing this among coworkers or roommates, it might be fun to publish the results to keep better tabs on who's doing what! You can always change your nickname - which appears on screen with your character - whenever you want. (At right: Peter's character sheet. And yes, we know Trogdor is a dragon. The name was just too good to pass up.)

Make up a fun name for your group, and invite others to join. In our case, we are The Cleanup Crusaders. Now... this is where it's a little bit of a pain for those with small kids: you have to log out as yourself, and create a new account for each child. If they are too young to go online and log in their own hours, or if you want to oversee them doing it, make them NPCs (Non-Playing Characters). So, you will have to log in separately, each time you want to update any chores for any kid. That's literally the only complaint I have about this process, and trust me, the benefits far outweigh that one little thing!

Create a list of chores. There's a basic 15 that we started with, which I heartily recommend. Then you can tailor it after a day or two to add your own special chores and points. If there is an especially distasteful chore in your family, you can jack up the points and treasure to make it more enticing.

Rewards. At first, your kids are just going to be excited to participate, and compete for the most points. But there's more than one way to score at Chore Wars, and it's up to you and your family how you want to do it. Let's look at the three kinds of rewards and what you could assign to each.

XP: Stands for eXperience Points. Each chore has certain qualities that go with it. Something like vacuuming or mowing the lawn might require more stamina or strength, while paying bills or getting on the phone to negotiate something with the insurance company might require the use of more charisma and wisdom. The more chores you do, the more XP you get. And as your XP goes up, you get more points. In our house, whoever has the highest XP at the time we're going shopping gets to choose what flavor ice cream we get. Sounds like not a big deal, but on the last shopping day, one 7 year old and 8 year old managed to vacuum the bedrooms, wipe down both bathrooms, make their beds, clean their rooms, empty the dishwasher, and wash, fold, and put away a load of laundry, all in the same day, just to have the right to pick that ice cream flavor. In our house, it's ice cream; maybe at your house it's choosing a movie or what game to play on game night or getting a free download of a song on iTunes - whatever privilege would be most fun for your family.

Gold: Each chore comes with a random amount of gold that can be discovered when the chore is completed and logged. You can change these amounts as well. Our kids have done chores for quite a while now, but we struggled with how to give them an allowance and teach them about money as well. Now their allowance is based on the amount of gold they earn in the game. Whenever they reach 100 gold (or more), they may exchange it for a dollar in real money. Then I go in as an admin and subtract that amount from their profile and make a note of it in the game. The kids love this, and they get to see a direct correlation between the amount of work they do to help out the family, and the amount of money they get for their banks.

Treasure: For every chore, you can also assign treasure to find (and the chance of finding it). You can make up totally silly things, for instance, for recycling, we added "the golden yogurt container" just to be funny. However, as the game says, you can make those magic items correspond to things in the real world. From the help page:

Perhaps "fizzy potion" treasures could be used as free-drink vouchers, "golden dishmop" objects could be gained from washing-up and used as a "get out of washing-up free" card, or the younger members of your party could spend a pre-agreed amount of Chore Wars gold to buy a toy.

In our case, we will be gathering all sorts of coupons and vouchers for stores downtown, plus little toys and erasers and stickers and things, and putting them into a box we'll call the Treasure Chest. Each adventurer can surrender one of their treasures in the game for a real-life reward of their choosing from the Treasure Chest.

Are you convinced yet? If you decide to do this with your family, roommates, or co-workers, I would love to hear about how it's working for you!

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I have a number of art projects that I keep wanting to start, but haven't, and think, wow, I really ought to be painting, and then I feel lame for not having done any painting lately.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I don't have to specifically paint to still be an artist, because being an artist is just what I AM. I've been exploring a lot of other things lately that have really satisfied my creative itch but haven't necessarily been putting a brush to paper. I'm feeling content to let the muse lead me wherever she wants to, without me beating it up or feeling I have to master it. Some things I've been doing lately:

Decorating. I've cleaned up my office and gave it a very colorful and thorough makeover. I absolutely love working in this space every morning and it really does energize me. That being said, I've moved on to...

The kids' bedrooms. Totally fun to reflect their personalities while still getting the upper hand on clutter and how to prevent any spaces for it in the future. Not to mention finally hanging up all those paintings I've done for them over the years! Which means...

Our bedroom is next. We've lived in this house for something like a dozen years and still never decorated anything. This summer we'll be building a headboard for the bed, I'll be pulling out the sewing machine to make some bedding and pillows, and I'll frame some artwork/love notes for the walls. I've started a pinterest board where I'm posting ideas if anyone wants to follow along.

The day job. I can't wait until some of these projects are street-approved and I can share, because they've been so much fun to work on. It's loads of design, but really creative design (including package design! woo!)

Music. There will probably be another post about this at some point, but I'm thinking of learning a new instrument for my birthday next month. Why not? And meanwhile, I've been enjoying teaching myself to play "Mr. Bellamy" by ear on the piano. I have the verses pretty note-perfect now. I'm having a lot of fun with it, considering it's a song about a guy who throws himself off a ledge (albeit a very catchy song about a guy who throws himself off a ledge).

See where this is going? I could list a ton of other things... cooking, fashion, how I braid the girls' hair, fixing up an old bike, designing a dress for myself instead of just the girls, how we went and bought 10 bottles of nail polish from the drugstore and have been going nuts with the pedicures.... it's more like I'm just BEING creative, with all my being. And letting myself be free to do just that.

Painted on the fly (HA!) in our backyard.

For those who haven't been reading my twitter feed (can't really bring myself to say "tweets"), here's the scoop. I've been sick, exhausted, and physically incapable of scanning and posting anything for the past few days, but I did make an effort to slap the paint around.

So.... what I think I'm going to try to do now that I'm on the mend, is to do one big post with everything in it so far that's in my sketchbook that didn't make it onscreen yet. And then, hopefully, we'll be back on track with the whole painting/posting thing.

Keep painting, people!

We've been on a bit of an Ed Emberley kick around here. I think Angela's Nessie is way cuter than mine, don't you?

That's right... it's recital time! And this year I'm trying to stay in town the whole time with the kids, instead of going to my parents' each night and driving back late with cranky kids. This experiment is either going to be a great idea, or it will be a really, really, bad one. If I get paintings done and posted every day, it will be a miracle.

I think I got the hair right this time. Yeah! (And yes, it is this big, and yes, I LOVE it.)

The beautiful and ethereal Sophie posing for me for about 20 minutes at bedtime, with Lambey tucked down the top of her PJs. This one actually took a LOT of color correction as my scans kept coming out either too brassy or too dark. It still doesn't exactly match the tones of the original but it'll do. And as for her eye sizes not matching - that's Soph. Her right eyelid has had surgery on it twice, and it doesn't open as wide as her left. If I made them the same, it would look like another child entirely.

Believe it or not, in real life this snippet is about 1.5" x 2" tall and was way harder to paint than it looks! I'm going to stay away from straight lines for a while....

Lame? Perhaps. But there is a precedent....

Peter Reynolds writes on his site:

I have a promise to myself that I will make a mark in my journal each night, even if I am tired. I will try to jot a drawing, or a poem, or a word, or even a simple mark to just prove I was alive that day.

One night, when I was exhausted, I made a mark with a black felt-tipped marker and promptly fell asleep. When I awoke with a start an hour or two later, I noticed the little mark had mushroomed into one giant black dot.

I put the cap on the pen, put the book to one side and went back to sleep. When I awoke the next morning, I looked at the journal again and instead of seeing it as a mistake... I suddenly realized that perhaps this was one of the best ideas I had ever had.

I grabbed the pen and quickly jotted "The Dot" above the black dot and "by Peter H. Reynolds" below it. I had just created the cover to my new book.

(also: Illustration Friday, Beginner)

So this weekend, my very stylish sister took me shopping and I learned a lot about what I will and won't (and shouldn't!) wear. While I've been dressing myself most of my life, I don't know that I was necessarily dressing myself well. I'm still kind of a beginner at this.

One thing I learned this weekend was that I dislike empire waists (on me). And not only that, I especially dislike how an empire waist looks on me when there are no sleeves involved. According to my sister, I look fine, but to me, that's just putting "the girls" (as she calls them) on display a little too much. I think it all smacks of maternity wear to me! But something belted where I actually have a waist? Or something soft and flowy? That works. It amuses me that I'm hitting a milestone birthday this summer and I still have so much to learn about myself.

Another thing I feel like I'm back to being a beginner at, is painting. I have had some incredibly loooooooong stretches with no paint, as I've said, and forcing myself to get the watercolors out is sometimes just plain hard. Compounding this is the fact that I am trying to work using as little pencil as possible, and letting the paint suggest what's going on. Less is more.

I almost didn't post this because I thought it was so bad, but I think there's a kind of redemption in the way this doodle progresses from the first figure (ugh) to the last (kind of getting the hang of it). Not to mention I've never painted my hair since my new haircut - I have to devote a day to a curl study, and the way light bounces off them, and how to suggest curls without having to paint each one. As Michelangelo said in his 80s, "I am still learning."

Swingy dresses are fun to paint!

And now, the divine Angela, who is sporting lavender pjs, hugging her lavender pony, and topping the look off with a glittery aqua scarf (not to mention the GORGEOUS cascading curls). This first-grader's got style!

This is Sophie assuming her usual ice-cream eating position: shoulders hunched way up, and sometimes giving a little shudder when the ice cream is too cold but she can't help eating another bite. This is a girl who really enjoys her ice cream. :)

My boy Petey playing on the iPod in bed in his pjs (because he can). I was going to paint this but I liked the drawing so much just the way it is that I decided to leave it as it is. Peter likes it so much he wants to take it to school.