Painting Like a Child

So here is the story on these paintings.  My daughter Amelia has always loved coloring with crayons and occasionally color pencils but she never really wanted to help me with my own work.  I've noticed recently that she has taken a great interest in watching me paint.  At first she just watched and would make comments on the color I was using.  She then started to become a little more hands on so we gave her one of my old watercolor palettes and some brushes and let her go to town.  I got to admit, I love her paintings.  So I decided to rummage through some drawings that I never finished or just had laying around on scratch paper and I decided to create some art with her.  We took some of these warm up sketches and painted over them. She was allowed free reign to color them as she saw fit. I occasionally would take the paper away and allow some of the excess water bleed around the paper... which made her very angry... I guess she didn't like my creative imput.  I then inked them with brush and crow quill and then used her favorite medium, crayon, to add some other touches.  I enjoyed the collaboration, it took boring sketches and made them interesting.  More than anything, I found the process interesting.  I've trained myself to use a certain creative process when painting and when you allow a 2 year old to do whatever she wants to do with the composition it just completely throws that process out the window.  Here is our results so far...

Amelia, adding some happy little blue tones.