Family Paint

I'm so thrilled that Kenna is majorly into artsy crafty things. Her favorite by far is painting! Almost every day she begs me to paint, or asks me at bedtime if we can paint tomorrow. This time she invited Daddy to join her, and when Finn went down for a nap, we all three painted together!

 I want to encourage and facilitate her creativity as much as possible, but sometimes painting just sounds like way too much of a mess to do every day. We found some easy ways to make the set up/clean up not such an ordeal- we use a little styrofoam veggie tray as a paint pallet, which washes off easily to be reused several times. When we got something large in the mail that came separated by large squares of cardboard, we saved them in the basement and they make the perfect sized table top that we can set out quickly for messy projects.

Kenna sat and dictated an idea to Daddy and he painted it to her exacting specifications- a "scary switch" with scary teeth. Then afterwards she wanted the witch to have a dress, and Daddy somehow managed to fit that in as well.

Here is their finished collaborative masterpiece:

 

Mommy painted a Kenna-inspired "happy" sign in pink and orange:

And here are some of Kenna's finished ones. The first one picked up the texture of the cardboard beneath it. The second one reminds me of big slices of summer tomatoes! However, Kenna likes to pick which of her "pieces" go on our fridge, and neither of these were worthy to make the cut. Too funny.

She is such a prolific painter that I ended up getting one of those little cardboard shelf files meant for magazines to hold all her finished sticker, paint, and marker creations!