paint cut paste

we’ve been having a lot of BIG fun over here…

often in our house, we hear novi calling from the den, “mommy, will you trace my hand on the magnadoodle?” so i oblige, and she decorates her hand.

yesterday morning, a light went off for me – body tracing! body tracing is a wonderful body awareness intervention in the art therapy world – how perfect for a toddler. novi loves to draw people’s faces and bodies and learn about what parts go where. this is right up her alley – making a life-sized self image! so we got down to business. i rolled out some light brown kraft paper that i had around (any roll of large paper would work – like the rolls you put on your kid’s easel or solid wrapping paper, etc.) then novi layed down on it, oh-so-giddy about the prospect.

i traced her outline with a black crayon (so as not to mark up her cute peacock pajamas.) she giggled when i traced her ticklish feet! then we got out our creamy crayons to decorate it (markers or crayons would have been fine, too, but she chose to use the creamy ones because “they show up brighter”)

she tried to make it in her likeness with blonde hair, blue eyes, a pink mouth.

she chose the outfit the “big novi” would wear and decorated it, down to the flower on the shirt, green crocs, and a silver bracelet.

when it was finished, she had a laughter fit about how her new novi friend was her twin…

then novi instructed me to cut out the image so she could put it on her wall. we taped it (with blue painter’s tape) to her bathroom door. (i could totally see these lining the halls of a preschool or elementary school…)

now she laughs at it every time she heads to the bathroom. such a fun activity that teaches little ones who are just learning about drawing people how to place all of the parts onto a figure, and a great confidence booster in celebrating and decorating their own body’s shape and size!

the other day i decided to bust out the pastels on novi… oil pastels and chalk pastels, both. just because they are called pastels, doesn’t mean they’re always pale and muted — these art materials make vibrant marks!

if you’re not familiar, oil pastels glide across a page much like a really slick, smooth crayon might. (kind of like novi’s creamy crayons, which we love, but they’re more narrow. kind of the diameter of a crayon.) they smear and blend together really nicely, unlike crayons.

chalk pastels are like a higher quality chalkboard chalk… they have a finer dust particle that makes a total mess for really pretty smudges when blending. so we just spent the morning playing around with these new materials, which are usually reserved for mommy, so that made it exciting for the little one.

oil pastel image of a person & duck (labeled!)

novi made a few cool pictures with each medium. with the chalk pastels, we practiced smudging and blending colors with our fingers. some kids (uh, and adults, including me) may not enjoy the dry, dusty feeling of the chalks, or may become frustrated by the way their picture changes, smears, and becomes littered with fingerprints while working. other kids (and adults) really delight in this sort of mutable material. chalk pastels are great to use for learning how to mix primary colors together to make secondary colors.

flower study in chalk pastels

i brought the chalk pastel piece outside (without her) to spray it with a fixative spray (see link at the bottom of this blog for product info.) if you make art with the chalks, it will continue to smear and smudge unless you use some sort of fixative on it, but be sure to spray it where there’s good ventilation and away from tiny lungs.

i recently posted a poll on the paintcutpaste.com facebook fan page (hello sweet fans! thank you for your support!!!) about what your child’s favorite art material is. my comment was that novi’s favs are watercolors and crayons. what was i thinking?! most of the art done in my house is so very temporary… it’s on the MAGNA-DOODLE!

sun, person, flowers (36 months)

she adores this thing – has ever since she was about 18 months old, i recall. she has worn out the pens on at least three of them so far. by that, i mean that she draws so much with it that the coating comes off the tip of the pen and it starts to scratch the drawing surface.

"just a guy" (32 months)

i find that documenting and keeping record of novi’s magna-doodle art has allowed me to really see her chronological artistic development. because it is the simplest graphic medium – black lines on a grayish-white surface – i am able to really pay attention to how her lines and forms progress without a whole lot of variables. we leave novi’s out on the coffee table at all times in our house, and often that’s where she can be found. sure, the art is meant to change and move and grow and be erased and redrawn, but i encourage parents and caregivers out there to maybe take photos every week or every month over time to really witness the beauty of your child’s visual language unfolding over time. so fascinating!

some of the first people she drew (31 months)

a person, 5 weeks later (32.5 months)

a person with features, holding flower, duck, sun, cloud, groundline, and text; 3.5 months later (36 months)

i also enjoy how novi tells stories while drawing on the magna-doodle. it is fun to sit and listen to her creative process unfold, as she is still young enough that her internal dialog is expressed verbally. (oh how i’ll miss hearing that as she grows older!) some of the fun magna-doodle stories have been:

"this astronaut is flying with the birds!" (33 months)

"the mommy sun is feeding pomegranates to her baby suns" (32 months)

my personal fav: the day the "balloon boy" story broke, we told novi about it and this was her depiction of what happened (32 months)

another fun piece of magna-doodling is how novi is using it to practice writing her letters alllll the time. she makes up words quite a bit by stringing letters together on the screen and asking me what she spelled.

left: mirror - right: magna-doodle. odd. (33 months)

the amazing graduate school i attended to study transpersonal art therapy, naropa university, was buddhist-oriented. i consider myself somewhat buddhish; however, one of the many areas where i fall short of  the whole buddhist philosophy is how to handle the transient nature of a magna-doodle image. i just can’t let go of these masterpieces that novi creates. thus the obsessive photographing of this little fischer price toy, and entire web photo albums dedicated to her magna-doodle pieces on our private family site. i even added some to my i only have the account so i can see others’ photos flickr page, click here if you want to see more, though i realize this is a photo-heavy entry already. (they’re just too fun!)

happy doodling!