A Brush with Paint

A loooooooong time ago.. before Aed was two.. before the haircut.. when Asher was still pretty fresh.. I thought it might be a fun activity for Aed to try his hand at painting. He’s not a huge fan of crayons, though he will play with them for a short time (and I mean play.. they usually end up on the floor being pushed or dumped or tossed rather than used for coloring). He sort of likes pens, pencils, and the magnadoodle. But, we just really haven’t found his artistic niche. Though with his current obsession with playdough, I’m beginning to think he’s just more of a 3-D guy. :)

We don’t have a great set up for painting (for children or adults, boohoo.. note the wicker furniture. Bumpy surface, impossible to clean), but I decided to go for it anyway and just hope I could clean up whatever mess was made. Sounds like a good plan, yes? :)

Turns out, painting is very exciting! I had cut bits of colored paper and shown him how to glue as well, so he could make a mixed media painting if he so desired.

(And really, before any of you self-proclaimed ‘non-artistic’ mothers out there begin to lament your lack of creativity-inspired activities.. I did NOT think it through this much when I gave him the paint, brush, and paper.. I pretty much just thought, ‘Well that could be fun’ and gave him stuff :) Blogging can make lots of things look much more sparkly than they really are.. Also, my child is no artistic genius. He glued way more paper to his fingers than he did to his painting :) Just keeping it real here.)

So we got down to work. He was really excited to have his picture taken..

But in the end let me get a sort of good one to show off his lovely painting.

We have some work to do on the quality of our art documentation :)

He didn’t do a lot of painting on the paper itself, but REALLY enjoyed smudging the paint around on the palate. (I see finger paints in our future!) The best part of the whole thing turned out to be watching the water change colors when we rinsed the brush. He asked me over and over again to ‘make watah boo gen.’ (Or in big people terms, make the water blue again.)

One thing I hadn’t considered would be the potential difficulty in doing this while I was holding Asher. I’m a pretty good juggler, but at some point Aed managed to get his hands on his brother when I wasn’t ready for it and Asher got to join in the adventure.

We delved back in to painting again this week on a rainy, grey day and it was loved even more this time around. Fortunately, Asher was sleeping, so avoided painting peril. We got to use lots of colors and Mama helped, so we ended up with a fun, collaborative painting to adorn our refrigerator. (I let him choose the paper.. he chose a scrap piece of yellow which is why part of it is cut off :)

It was so fun to watch his delight as we turned a red(ish) triangle into a smiley face, then gave him a hat, then gave him feet so he could walk, then gave him ground to walk on! I delight in his delight :)

Aed was SO proud of this painting. At various times every day he decides it’s time to ‘see smiles’ and runs over to look at it. He has taken the time to show it to many of his toys and has asked numerous times to take a picture of it. He gets such a kick out of seeing it and counting the smiles. It’s great motivation to see what we can come up with next!