I was kidding myself when I thought I could start a new painting with two young daughters in tow. I thought they would just play nicely with their toys in the background as I whip up a masterpiece. I was SADLY mistaken. Since my eldest helped me with “organizing” the oils yesterday, she immediately thought she could start painting today. And the begging began before breakfast.
Now any artist loves to hear their children say “Mom? Can I paint?” so I had to cave in. Also this gave me a good warm up for myself since I may be tutoring a teenager this summer. Do I have the patience? Why not practice with my daughter? Keeping her attention for longer than 10 minutes will be a miracle.
So we started easy, I had two small square canvases that I had covered with a flat pink and flat blue months ago when my daughter first started asking to paint. They were practice canvases that I let her paint on while I was doing my sister-in-law’s behemoth of a painting, basically to keep her occupied and off MY canvas! So I dug them out of the closet along with some old Bob Ross mixed paints that I don’t like using. (They are premixed pinks and blues and greens, perfect for a young artist to play with but I like mixing my own)
Now, I wasn’t going to let her go gun ho crazy. I’d have oils all over the carpet, walls, everywhere. So this little tutorial was supervised. We took turns making circles. That was the only direction I gave her. She could dip her brush in the paint, I would mix the colors for her and then she could make as many circles on the canvas as possible. Then I would take my brush and I would make a circle. Back and forth until we filled the canvas. She stayed with it and when she said we were done, we were done. She did a much better job on the pink one than the blue, she was more focused and excited. I started losing her to Dora and Team Umizoomi but we got them both done!
Overall I thought she did very well. She learned to take turns, she learned her colors and she learned how to draw circles! Good enough for me! She was a little harsh on the brush, so teaching her to have a lighter touch was essential, there were a few times she would overload the brush and she knew it. She’d look at me and laugh, “Whoops! Waaay too much paint mom, clean it off!” And she also got her fill of painting, she moved onto glitter glue and scissors and now she is back to playing makeup-overs. Oh to be three again.
You can see our progress below, both were done in about 40 minutes:
And the final drying on the wall:
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Kids are smarter than you think.