a creative process

Inspired yet again by The Artful Parent (definitely my favorite blog for practical art ideas with young kids), I decided to pull out one of the big blank canvases I got at some time on sale and commission The Girl to make a painting for me.  We talked about how artists are sometimes paid to paint something specific, and so I asked her to paint a big flower for me on the canvas using acrylic craft paint.  I was picturing something like her Van Gogh sunflowers from school art class, but I told her she could decide how to do it.  And she did.  And...well...I didn't love it.  Isn't that awful?!?  She painted a tall, skinny rose, and then covered the background in light blue and lavendar (because she ran out of blue), and then painted bright red squiglies across the background.  It was...odd.

So I thanked her and put it aside to dry and wondered what in the world I was going to do with this large painting that she was very proud of but I didn't care for. 

And then I found this post on process painting at Paint, Cut, Paste.  Aha!  I decided to see if I could convince The Girl to continue to work on the painting with me.  To make it something we painted on a little bit at a time until we were done with it.  No plan, no particular end - just painting. 

She loved the idea!  Thank goodness.

And so we started on our painting, taking the basic shapes she'd already painted and expanding on them while also adding some new shapes.  I added a sun.  She added wind.  As usual - she is the more creative.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a before picture, but here's what we ended up with after our first joint painting day:

You can kind of see where her original rose and the squiglies are.  She was the one who decided to add the light blue slashes, which I thought was brilliant (ok, maybe it's not actually brilliant, but I thought it was very fun!). 

And after one more paint session, The Girl decided it was finished.  So this is our finished project:

Notice she gave it a title.  Yes, we watched Pocahontas recently.

I'm very pleased with the way it turned out, except that there's a little too much of me there.  Though the shapes and colors are mostly hers, a lot of the color blending and final style-look are mine, which is not what I intended.  But she got very focused on those slashes at the end!  Still, I'm very happy we made something together.  And the process helped us both.  I helped her with using a larger space (the canvas is 18x24) and blending color.  And she helped me with her boldness and excitement at trying new things.  It was fun.  We may have to do this again.

And the best part...she gave me $1.52 for my part of the commission.  And I gave her $1.52.  Not the same $1.52.  Oh no, that wouldn't do (I tried it).  A different $1.52.