(Caters News Agency)
NOON TOON: Williamsburg mother and artist Nina Levy (above) draws colorful oodles of superheroes like Captain America (below) on napkins for her kids’ school lunches. ([ credit ])
(Photos: Caters News Agency)
NOON TOON:
Williamsburg mother and artist Nina Levy (left) draws colorful oodles of superheroes like Captain America on napkins for her kids’ school lunches. She also creates original artwork, like this drawing of her son, Ansel, 6, with a tiger cub (right). (
)
The biggest treat in this lunchbox is the napkin.
A Brooklyn mom has drawn vivid works of art on her kids’ lunch napkins every day for seven years.
Williamsburg sculptor Nina Levy, 45, creates the images — of superheroes, knights with swords and fire-breathing dragons — on white paper napkins, using her grade-school sons’ requests for inspiration.
“It makes lunch more engaging,” she said. “And it’s sort of a journal of what the kids have been interested in.”
She asks her sons, Archer, 10, and Ansel, 6, what to draw in the kitchen at night while she packs lunches for school the next day, then tries her best to re-create what they describe.
Often, it’s epic battles, adventures with teddy bears come-to-life, and anything involving Batman or Luke Skywalker.
The napkin canvas idea first struck right before Archer’s first day of nursery school, Levy said. The doting mom doodled an image in black Sharpie — of Chicken Little, if she remembers correctly — to help Archer get through his first solo lunch. “I wanted to give him a little extra attention and let him know I was thinking about him,” she said.
It made him happy, and he soon began requesting that she draw cartoons (like Pokémon) and heroes from movies.
The doodles grew more and more colorful and complex and eventually became full-blown art — some worthy of a frame.
Levy now makes them for her younger son, Ansel,, who takes the napkins to school at Brooklyn Friends in Downtown Brooklyn.
He brings them home every day, used and crumpled — sometimes with food smudges. That doesn’t bother Levy, who said it’s part of what makes the whole thing fun and personal.
“You know, sometimes they look better with a yogurt smudge,” she said.
She said she spends anywhere from half an hour to two hours on each piece, snapping photos of her favorites for her art blog.
In case of a rare emergency, like the day she gave birth to Ansel, Levy keeps a small stash of the napkins stock-piled, she said.
She said she considered making a book out of the napkin art but decided against it because many of the characters, such as Batman, are copyrighted.
Her own original characters include a broccoli monster and a pirate cat.
She always signs the napkins: “Love, Mom.”