paint cut paste

grandma is in town and brought with her a really cool coloring set for N… metallic markers on black backgrounds with who else? the disney fairies!

nevermind that blank rectangle at the bottom where N already took the markers off.

i’m so not getting paid to endorse a product here, but i’ve always been a sucker for making art on black backgrounds, so that’s the gist of this post.

N said it was magical. something about having colors show up against a dark background is like drawing with light in a nighttime sky. she completed both images that came in this disney fairies shimmer art package.

we went out to lunch later in the day, and i thought to bring along these metallic markers from the set, along with an art journal i have with blank black pages in it. (by the way, you can get the sharpie metallic markers at target and they create the same effect.)

i drew a circle on the page and invited her to create a mandala. she LOVED this directive and really got into it.

mandala artists converse

creating this masterpiece…

for some more on creating mandalas on black paper, check out our blog from last year by clicking here.

sure, N draws people every single day. she also draws things she sees, but for some reason, she has yet to have a model sit for her and draw the person she sees, until now.

life drawing class in our kitchen

my mom (who N calls “gwee”) has been in town visiting. gwee offered to sit for her portrait to be drawn the other day while i was making dinner for the family.

N had a great time, and would not let the model see her picture until it was finished. (but mommy was allowed to see it and take pictures! yay!)  she drew the face and added realistic parts that i’ve not seen her do before when she draws from her imagination… like eyelids.

she decided to add a body and dress from her imagination. she wanted to color it with a “rainbow theme.” N said the one green eye (realistic) and one magenta eye (not realistic) were to keep it with her rainbow theme.

my mom said she’d take the portrait home and frame it for her house.

N is so honored!

so, i let my 3 year old use a sharpie today. yeah, i know they’re not for kids, but she is a drawing FIEND and loves to draw with a regular pencil because she enjoys the black and white contrast. i figured i could show her how to use one of my new retractable ultra-fine point sharpie markers, and she LOVED it. she drew and drew.

my personal favorite media combo to use is sharpie and watercolors, so i put out the paints, and let her paint on her drawings. ah, markers that aren’t water-based don’t run. the joy!

yellow raincoats

true to form, N cranked out some greeting (mostly birthday) cards. (her middle name should have been hallmark. seriously. does the fact that she makes every card that goes out of our house and most of the gifts qualify as child labor?)

for my mom's ("gwee") birthday

i just love these!

she did some other non-card sharpie drawing, too. welcome to my favorite media, little one.

what kid hasn’t transformed a cardboard box into a house or car? well, mine hadn’t until today. we recently got a new water cooler that came in a big box with some extra cardboard padding. just had to recycle some and upcycle the rest into an artsy plaything, of course!

first, N saw the cardboard and asked if she could draw on it with markers. once the markers were in hand, she said she wanted to draw a house on it. a lightbulb appeared above my head (in cartoon world,) and i suggested the cardboard BE the house and she draw all of the things on it that she’d want on the outside of her house. then she went to work on windows and doors, grass and flowers, trees and nests…

when she was finished drawing, i used an x-acto knife to cut out the door. i might have cut out the windows, too, if N hadn’t drawn such cute curtains onto them.

then i taped the two pieces of cardboard together with packaging tape to make them into a square.

N immediately began to bring in the (animal) inhabitants and furnishings.

she set a bunch of animals all around a fireplace, on chairs and benches, and said they were “telling stories and roasting marshmallows.” cozy. she even draped a yellow playsilk over the top of the box to make it seem bright inside, “and to keep out the rain.”

sure, these cardboard creations can get so much more elaborate. i’ve seen beautiful, intricate cardboard houses and birdhouses and furnishings made by others. but for us, this was an impromptu sunday morning thing that just happened simply and organically, just the way i like it. and there’s always room for N’s little house to grow!

this was good for HOURS of play today after it was made… wonder who will move in tomorrow…

if you’re a regular of this blog, you know that my daughter, N, is an avid magna-doodler. for real – she spends 45-120 minutes a day on that thing. she wears them out (really, the pen tips get scratchy.) we’re on our 5th or 6th (?) one in 2 years.

the time she spends magna-doodling is no joke… so we are turning these little masterpieces into gifts! for example, you may have seen the cool custom mug we made for father’s day from a magna-doodle image.

well, my mom and stepdad are celebrating their 20 year anniversary tomorrow (whoo hoo!) N calls my mom “gwee” and my stepdad “big daddy.” for their 20 year, we made them little anniversary hats. (and, of course, a handmade card.)

it’s easy to do this — i just took a digital photo of a magna-doodle image she drew a while back of “gwee and big daddy dancing.” i always take pics of these, for posterity’s sake. they’re so temporary and i’m not a good buddhist about such things.

the original

then i traced over her lines in pixelmator (my free version of a photoshoppy product) in order to make them less grainy. the magna-doodle has those weird cells in it that don’t translate well, so this would be better done with an actual paper and marker drawing, but i had to use what we had.

i saved that image and put it on a product of choice on cafepress.com — hats. they are boaters and tennis players, so albeit cheesy, i know they will actually wear these.

happily, N is doing a lot more doodling on actual paper, so the drawings aren’t as temporary as they were on the magna-doodle. in the future, i can skip the tracing step – yay!  happy 20 years, gwee & big daddy!

and seriously, if this keeps up, everyone we know will likely get a doodled tshirt or pair of boxers for the holidays this year. oh, and while you’re making cool artsy gifts on their site (no, i don’t get paid for this endorsement of cafepress or for anything else) hop over to the paintcutpaste shop on cafepress and show us some love… spread the word: you know you want a paintcutpaste.com smock, tote, or sigg bottle!

on a recent trip to colorado to visit my dear fellow art therapist friends, they reminded me of a fun little activity that i used to do when i was a little girl – scratch drawings! as a kid, i loved the magic of revealing a rainbow under a dark, black veil. i thought N might appreciate this, too.

i thought i remembered painting thick paper with watercolor, coloring over it with thick black crayon, and scratching… but perhaps not. my art therapist friend (and momma) was doing this with her 3 year old and reminded me that you can color with crayons or pastels, and then put a thick coat of acrylic paint over the whole page to scratch through. so we gathered our materials (thick paper, crayons, acrylic black paint) and began…

N and i both covered a page with patches of tons of colors… i got a blister from doing this!

then we painted over the entire lovely page with black acrylic paint.

we let it dry overnight. once it was dry, we got out a few scratching tools – a wooden skewer, a paperclip, a tack, and a nail. not all of them were cool for young kids, but N seemed to do well and was careful with all of them. whew!

N drawing with a nail. (bad mommy?)

we scratched and scratched to reveal fun pictures… “nighttime scenes!” as N excited called them.

you know me and cutting things out and putting them on colorful papers as borders. (yeah, i did that again. maybe for cards?)

who knew that when N found the regular old pencil i put in her colored pencil cup, a new favorite medium would be born?

she’s been keeping it simple over here for a coupla days now… just doing basic line drawings with a pencil and some scrap paper i keep in a bin on her art desk.

while N draws, she always narrates what is going on in the picture and what the characters are saying, in different voices and such.it’s fascinating to watch.

i will share a few (of the stack that’s collecting) of her little scenes – so fun!

festival with bounce-house, daddy with cotton candy, N with balloons, and mommy with her camera (what else would i have?)

walrus jumping rope while a bird brings her (easter) eggs to a nest

N feeding our cats their dinner bowls, but the cats are mad (see wagging tail) because a yeti has caught a person in a lasso

L to R: bird with a present, ant, spider climbing tree trunk to his web, bee, butterfly, flowers

she even made a little birthday card for our cat, bean, who turned 9 on sunday… just one day before N turned 3.5 years old this past monday, the 26th – (yes, those half-birthdays are a big deal, right?)

she wrote the message and drew a picture of herself playing with bean with the laser cat toy

the other night she began to add some color to a few line drawings she did, using her crayons. i am really into this artistic development going on over here!

our cat, bean, giving iridessa (the light-talent fairy) a rainbow tube

so for this one, i’m willing to bet you’ve got all the materials you need!