Painting with Children - "Finer" Art

It's obvious that Boo loves to paint....it's one of the first things she'll ask to do each morning. What's different about the paintings below from the painting in my last post about painting is the TYPE of paint. In the large painting last week we used washable paint.....it's is easy to clean up but the color isn't as vibrant and the paint is easily washed off of the canvas. I'll often let her use acrylic craft paints to make large paintings that we will hang up in the house because the paint is more permanent.....we jokingly call this her "fine art" painting. I've got a few tips to help your child paint something you could hang on your living room wall!

When the weather isn't nice enough to paint outside, I'll lay all my drop cloths down in our foyer because it is such an open area. I lay the canvas flat so she can sit on the floor and draw on it with her water crayons or splatter and dribble large amounts of paint around:


If I give her a LARGE amount of paint like this gallon of gesso....I'll give her one large paint brush. She can dribble, drop, splatter just like Jackson Pollock:


The key is to keep the painting an interesting activity. When she starts to get a little bored, I'll remove the canvas from the floor and set it upright. I'll use boxes or a postal crate to set her paint on so she doesn't step in it when she's deep in thought:


I rotate the canvas often.....so she sees her painting differently. It's amazing how turning a painting 90 degrees will allow her to see a big blank space she never noticed before.....or couldn't reach. This is how I paint too.....when I get bored I just turn the painting upside down!


I think most of the enjoyment of the painting for her is mixing and dripping large amount of paint.....I guess it could be comparable to making mudpies. I'll admit, this is why I love painting so much....I love the mixing and the spreading and the pushing of pigment around the surface to see what happens.


One of the most frequent questions I get is: how do you keep her from mixing the colors together and getting that muddy brown result? Simple, I give her a huge selection of paints to choose from, but from only one color palette at a time. I love the 99 cent craft paints because they come in so many colors....and I'll give her one bin at a time:


She'll mix and mix and mix.....but she's usually mixing pink with purple, or red with pink....so she doesn't cross the color wheel.


Once some of the paint has dried I'll give her another bin to play with. The result is that the canvas is covered with layers and layers of rich colors!


She had fun today practicing her letters......she's still writing many of them backwards but hey, it makes for interesting art, right?


This masterpiece will be going in Mr. Lil Blue Boo's new office soon! He can tell clients it was painted by a very "established" local artist :)