Art with Ransom

As an artist, I of course love to see my son create.  Ransom's not always super into it though.  I try not to pressure him too much, because he doesn't have to be a mini me.

But toddlers are changing every day, and mine got really into painting with me recently.  I thought I'd use this blog post to take a break from my regularly scheduled all-about-my-art and turn it to Ransom.

This is activity was pretty fun for me, because it was totally unplanned.  We kinda played it by ear and let the process lead us along.

First, he decided he wanted to do some painting.  Of course I was so excited about this, because like I said it's not always his first choice of activity.  So I prepped a piece of paper and gave him some oil pastels and stickers while I got the paint ready.

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Then I provided yellow and red paint.  Limiting the colors keeps it from all just becoming brown. And then we got to discover that yellow and red make orange.

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He was layering the paint on real thick, so we got out some cotton swabs to draw lines in the layers of paint.  And we had to clean the swabs on something so we got out some extra paper.

And then we started using our fingers and hands. (and threw in some purple)

We ending up going through a lot of paper. Two year olds are not very concerned with finished products, but I wanted a few nice looking paintings out of this experience  so I took away some of the papers when I liked how they were looking.

Here's one of the masterpieces, which I think I want to have framed.

The less frame worthy pieces I plan on cutting up for future collages.  We attempted one the other day together. He wasn't as into it as the painting, but still enjoyed using the goopy glue.

All in all it was a super fun and inspiring activity for me, hopefully for him as well. 

Because of it I got a book from the library called First Art for Toddlers and Two: Open Ended Art Experiences.  It's hard for me to make it truly open ended.  For instance, with the collage I felt like it needed more, but he had lost interest.  For a few days I kept asking him to glue more things on or at least draw on it with some oil pastels.  He eventually did, but I probably should have just let it be.

I'm excited to dive into the book though and create more with him.