An Artful Collaboration

jeweled collaboration

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The girl has been waking up much earlier than I’d like this week, and the other morning I guess I drifted off for a minute after she left our room and I didn’t know what she was up to. I asked what she was doing and she said “drawing and reading books.” (There was no evidence she was actually reading books and, thankfully, no evidence she was drawing in reading books.)

“Do you want to draw with me?”

Who could resist that request? Even at 6:30 in the morning? I said sure, she said “it’s art time!” and we pulled out the big easel pad and started drawing.

First she drew this, which she said was her daddy (he’s not that round in real life). I had to tape it together because she ripped it pulling it off the pad to give to him.

daddy drawing
I think this is the first time she’s drawn something that looked like a person and said it was a person.

I started doodling on another page, first my classic flower doodle that I draw all the time, then a random shape I colored in and started drawing contrasting dots on.

She came over and decided to help me color in the petals on the flower and added some oomph to my other drawing, too. I love it when we create together!

coloring collaboration
I love this drawing we made together.

An Unexpected Collaboration

Later in the day, while the Bit was at school, I started a little art project of my own. I have a lot of different momcraft websites bookmarked but I don’t visit them very often. Sometimes I’ll pick one at random to look at while I’m thinking or waiting for something to happen (I guess those are kind of the same thing, aren’t they?) and a couple days ago the one I landed on was TinkerLab. First, I love the name, because I think life should be all about experimenting. But this is a great site all about creative play, learning and experimentation for kids.

And not just for kids, as it turns out. I happened upon her Double Page Spread Challenge, which is a way of encouraging people to open a sketchbook and create a double-page spread of some kind of art every day. This was really inspiring to me because as moms we tend to become momcrafters, meaning we’re making stuff for our kids, or crafts inspired by our kids, which is great, but we so rarely take the time to just make for the sake of making or to make what we want to make.

The only problem is, I don’t even own a sketchbook. I have an old book filled with white paper that I did some kind of artsy journaling in many years ago and since abandoned, but I didn’t want to pull that out, and I needed to go to Jo-Ann anyway so I thought I’d get myself a book and at least try to play with it a bit. Even though I don’t really consider myself artistic, I’d like to be.

But there weren’t any sketchbooks there that could handle paint, so I just got some watercolor paper. Then I don’t have to worry about double-page when I haven’t even done single-page in a really long time.

I thought I could use these as a way to play with materials, and since the Bit has more materials of this sort than I do I figured I’d start there. I pulled out some of her fingerpaints and made another flower using the paper towel roll stamping technique I’ve used before. I went ahead and used a paintbrush to paint the petals, and mixed the paint together at the end because I liked that look I was getting with the stamping where the colors overlapped.

When it dried I added a single jewel sticker to the center of the flower. I left it out on the table and at suppertime the Bit saw it and decided it need more embellishment.

jeweled collaboration
Fine art it is not, but it sure is sparkly!

I like her version, too.

What have you been making with your kids lately? I’d love to hear about it! Thanks for visiting, commenting and sharing!


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