Mini Artist
November 23rd, 2009 by Susannah
Sitting here uninspired, tired and in all honesty feeling like grabbing a peppermint tea and watching some crap TV! But I am sooooo close to completing my NaBloPoMo challenge that I refuse to fail! One week to go! It’s been an interesting exercise so far. I blog mostly at night and I have found it’s the ‘forgetting to take photos during the day’ that makes me falter. That is something I really must get better at organising in between kindy pickup/dropoff, dance classes, work, Christmas shopping, toddler melodramas and trips to the park! Hmmmm what can I scan tonight….
The girls have a little desk in my studio space where they like to sit and create their masterpieces. I often find random artwork taped to the walls and furniture, my very own gallery complete with two mini curators! This treasure above was left for me the other day! Eloise is into drawing ‘hearts’ at the moment and I often make the mistake of asking ‘and what’s that’ which is greeted by an exasperated ‘it’s a love heart Mummy’ complete with rolled eyes. Ahhh silly me! (They’re love hearts around the top of the carriage, just in case you’re like me haha). She’s starting to get more detail into her drawings and it’s so interesting to see the way she thinks. She can be so slap happy sometimes. She does not care about what she uses, but it’s usually the closest thing she can find even if it’s a blunt pencil or a half dried out texta. But she is lucky. She can be creative, free and unrestricted. I try to just let her go and not influence her (besides, she’d get cranky at me if I started to tell her what to do!). I love watching the process!
The artwork above was really interesting to watch. On her own initiative she decided to trace around scraps of paper, bottle tops, small objects she could find within arms reach, and then used the shape to determine what it would be: an alien, a person with a spotty guitar, a hand with a face and legs, a platypus…and she seemed to have a lot of fun in the process and was really proud of her masterpiece! Usually she writes her name everywhere, sometimes it’s only her name on the paper, over and over again…sometimes right way around, sometimes backwards, sometimes upside down and sometimes the ‘E’s have half a dozen cross strokes! I’m now watching Caitlin start to obsessively scribble, and waiting for the first recognisable face or person to appear. I’ve always been fascinated by children’s artwork, and it’s incredibly exciting to watch my own! A little window into what’s going on inside their head.
