Art, Children, Observations

It’s art hanging day in the princess room.

This painting went up a few days ago when my daughter was at an outsourced homeschool class.  When she returned home, I heard giggles–I LOVE her laugh–tumbling out of her room.  She loves it!  Whew.

I was a little nervous, you see, because I had painted over a canvas she doodled on when she was four years old.  I loved so many of her passages on the canvas,  but overall I wasn’t loving the painting.  She does not like me to mess with her art.  I get that.

What I do love is this drawing she also did when she was four.  Just makes me smile, huge.  So I thought it would be a fun idea to combine the two as an homage to her four-year-old art style.

I tried to preserve as many of the fabulous marks she made on the painting while adding the blue-dress lady.

When my daughter was four, she made these fabulous multi-tiered, scale-like crowns for her princesses.  They were fabulous.  At the time she drew these crowns in with pencil and I painted the scallops in.  She went over it with glitter, but of course.

An upside down red crown.

I also saved the flowers she painted in.

And now I think I need to incorporate more glitter into my art.

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Reading with my kiddos is one of my favorite things to do with them.  We plow through library books, but sometimes we look at design books together and pick our favorite rooms.  Other times we go through The Art Book, thumb through, and pick our favorite art on the two pages.  Aside from being fun for me, the seemingly innocent cuddly reading time becomes exposure to art and artists and an exercise in articulating preferences.  I’m sneaky like that.

So the game goes like this, as it happened the other day with my four-year-old son:

“Which one do you like better?  The one by Giorgio Morandi?  Or, the one by Gustave Moreau?”

“Gustave Moreau.” (in the cutest mispronunciation ever)

“Okay.  Why do you like that one better?”

“Because, you know, she is naked.”

Word for word.  Ah, boys.

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And, this is what my daughter wrote this week in her assignment to write three sentences using her spelling words.

She was pleased to know that I’ve, indeed, seen an antique store spelled “Anteeks.”

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Enjoy the weekend, everyone!