Art Time

Gabriel and I love doing things together: sometimes I carry him into my world (like last night when I gave him a table knife and he cut up an entire zucchini from my garden for me, which I was able to toss right into a skillet & sautee for dinner!) and other times I jump into his (like earlier this week when we played in the backyard with imaginary friends and had the silliest of conversations between our hands!).

Today we had art time, which is more like a melding of our two worlds. 🙂 We both love art time, I think. And now that he is getting a little older and a little better at following specific directions, it’s more involved than just plopping him down with paper and crayons to see what he randomly does. Now I can give him a coloring page and tell him, “color all the pants blue, then color all the peoples’ hair orange” ~ and he will. He loves to trace hands onto paper. He enjoys stamps and stickers. But mostly he loves painting. We’ve had Color Wonder paints for a while because I just can’t resist their amazingly easy cleanup. 😉 But while we were given some Melissa & Doug fingerpaints over a year ago, they weren’t really great and ran out quickly. So today I decided that it would be super fun to make our own fingerpaints and do art time. We were able to work on following directions, talking about colors, counting, etc. so it’s a really fun way to make “schooling” stuff super-duper-fantastically-fun!

Following this recipe, Gabriel & I whipped up a batch of fingerpaints real quickly ~ I did not leave the stove on low, so with the higher heat, it took about half the time but worked just dandily. 🙂 We only had a couple of food coloring options on-hand, so we ended up with three colors: beautifully vibrant, fun, cheerful shades of yellow, blue, and green.

Although Gabriel is one of the cleanest, neat-nickiest 3-year-olds I have personally come into contact with, he eventually dipped his fingertips in, and after about twenty minutes I even convinced him to plop his whole hand onto the pages. Too fun.

Now he is napping while his artwork is drying (although he insists that he wants to use fingerpaints again as soon as he wakes up!) , and the paints are in some little plastic containers (anyone keep practically every plastic container you ever get, just because you know it may eventually come in handy for giving things away or doing something kid-friendly?). In the background of one of the pictures you can see two buckets on the counter covered in bright green Duck Tape; those are our “art buckets” and we love them. One is filled with coloring books, paper, cardboard, etc. while the other is filled with crayons, pencils, stencils, stamps, stickers, paints, homemade playdough, markers, etc. Again with keeping plastic containers (these were laundry detergent buckets) for repurposing into random fun stuff. 🙂

I’m so thankful my redhead shadow loves art time just as much as his mommy. 🙂