This is the first painting to have our three signatures on it! The painting itself is nothing extraordinary, but the process of creating something wiht the kids was what's precious about this project.
We discussed the theme of the painting - something 'cute' and incorporates our love for plants and birds. After transferring the sketch onto the canvas, I cut out a bunch of stencils and painted the base of the canvas.
Filling a stencil may seem a bit mindless, but as the stencils were cut from cereal boxes, they didn't lay all that flat on the canvas. I had to really stress to the kids on stroke direction in order to not have the paint bleed under the stencil. Also, I used our recent favorite picture book as an example to show them how mixing lighter and darker shades on one object will make it appear to have more dimension. They had fun experimenting with mixing different shades, and Kai-Yu even said "wow the vases look so real!" Such a flatterer.
There were also some parts of the painting that was not done through the stencils. But the real challenge, I felt, was marking down that signature! Stroke pressure, letter sizes and spacing were still a bit diffcult for them. We'll need to practice more!
The kiddos were quite pleased with the finished proejct! And I overcame my fear for drilling, successfully mounted hooks and wire on the canvas and nailed it on the wall! I know this is nothing to be proud of, but I feel very accomplished.
We decided to hang the painting on the living room wall across from the fireplace. We currently only have a side table from IKEA and a decorative lamp from Urban Barn. Now there's a painting on the wall, we can shift our focal point upwards to avoid constantly noticing the modem and wire clutter underneath the side table.
If you think we're all done here and about to recycle all the stencils, then you don't really know us. How could I not make use of the positive space of the stencils? Now these colored vases and the bird that's got lots of questions made the space in front of my desk so much more fun and interesting to look at!
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