Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Hand Painting

My planned weekly rhythm has Wednesday as art and craft day. Shamefully I haven't got the paints out for Little Cherub since she used them for the first time back in June (this is why I need a weekly rhythm). When I asked if she would like to paint she was thrilled. This time after painting a little with brushes she decided to explore hand painting - she recently saw a clip on TV of children painting with their hands and feet, and it obviously had an impact. She wanted to start with red and green paint, then added in blue, and right at the end yellow.

"Look! I'm hand painting!"



"Oh dear! Mess."


The clean up went swimmingly. Rather too swimmingly. Being very petite, Cherub couldn't quite get her hands under the tap even when standing on her super-tall IKEA plastic stool. The fingers could reach but the rest of her hand couldn't. I lifted the washing up bowl full of water down onto her stool so that she could finish her hands while I cleaned up the paint pots and brushes. Once her hands were clean I took my eye off her ... then realised belatedly that she had decided to wash her apron in the bowl. With rather a lot of overflow. While I tried to mop up, she slipped over on the wet floor and had to be removed shrieking from the kitchen to drier ground.

5 comments:

Melanie Bettinelli said...

Oh we need to get back to doing art. Like you, we did painting once and then no more after it got put away. I like your rhythm idea but need to actually implement it.

I wonder if I could get my fastidious Bella to do finger painting. I love the pictures!

I also love the easel and hope we can find something like it. I think one of my barriers to getting out the painting things is having to move her little table into the kitchen and having it get stuck there for several days until the painting bug dies down again. Though maybe an easel wouldn't help as much with that as I'd like to think....

The Bookworm said...

The odd thing is that when she saw the hand (and foot!) painting on TV she was both intrigued and horrified by the "mess". I have a feeling that if I had tried to suggest hand painting to her she would have shied away. As it was, it was entirely her own idea, done at her own pace.

I love the easel and I'm sure we will get a lot of use out of it over the years, but there are lots of art activities that will still need the little table moving into the kitchen. I wish our kitchen was large enough to have a second small table and keep it there, but it isn't. Also, the easel is really still too large for her - reaching the top half of the paper takes a lot of stretching. I must try to remember to give her a stool next time.

Shari said...

Looks like such fun!! And painting right next to the washing machine...brilliant!

Romany said...

LOL! No apron for her? You like to live dngerously!

Anonymous said...

She is so sweet!! Very busy in her painting project.