My Kids Are Artists Too

People often ask me if my kids aged 12 and 15 are artists too. My answer is “hell yeah!”. I’m really proud of their work but sometimes I wish they weren’t so busy all the time and would learn to clean up a little once in a while. They wrote, directed, acted, filmed and edited their own movie this summer. I love how my kids can make their own entertainment out of the dress up bin. I hope they never outgrow this. Will the finished piece be a masterpiece? I think probably not, but what a great experience. I bite my tongue when I see the incredible messes that are left in the wake of their creative flurry.


Here are a few pictures of what they’ve been up to this summer.

Delaney's abstract paintings

Delaney's art portfolio from summer camp

Savannah's watercolors from summer camp

This was actually Delaney's lunch one day, that's Larry Cat checking it out

Delaney helped me make wrapping paper with some left over paint and newsprint

Delaney has to wear collared shirts to school and she's not going to wear boring solids every day so she splatter painted her shirt

Here's a shirt I made for her with fabric she chose

Fabric she painted to make a pillow for her room

I painted the wall purple in her bedroom to surprise her for her birthday and together with a friend we painted the spiral. Here she's gluing pompoms to her lamp shades.

Delaney also made cute animals out of plastic eggs, paper flowers from a tracing of her hand and cool jewelry out of buttons. Today they were off to their friend's house dressed as cats.

When I was a kid, the neighborhood kids were always at my house where my sister’s and I were allowed to make costumes out of old clothes and odds and ends and we wrote scripts and put on plays all the time. Our Christmas gifts were always craft kits like a pottery wheel or glass cutting kit. My mother sewed and my father had a wood shop in the basement. I was always making things, and still am. My craft room is a mess! I cleaned my studio this week though and can't wait to get in there and start making messes!

Marbleized Paper

I love marbleized paper but never really had much luck when I tried to make it in the past. I recently stumbled across the directions in a book for children's crafts so I thought I'd give it another try. The directions said to thin oil paint down with paint thinner and drip a few drops of a couple colors in the water, drag a toothpick though it to make designs and carefully lay the paper down to pick up the paint. Sounded easy so I played with it a bit in my studio. At first I had the paint too thin the directions said the consistency of cream so eventually I got it right. I wore gloves to lift the paper up after it touched the paint floating on the water. The results were beautiful. I let them dry and then brought them home but noticed they smelled strongly of oil paint and thinner even though I used Turpenoid instead of regular paint thinner.

Then my assistant Jeanne gave me a kit with supplies that were non toxic and water based. That prompted me to do an internet search and I learned about a method that uses liquid starch and watered down acrylic paint. Beautiful! I couldn't wait to try it. It worked really well once I got the paint to the right consistency. Now the kids could pull the paper up by themselves without having to worry if they got it on their hands and it smelled great, like fresh laundry.

Here's Shannon showing us the beautiful results. The kids loved it. I read that you should wash the starch off so we passed the prints though a tray of water after letting them dry a bit. I also just read that a 1/2 teaspoon alum mixed into 2 cups of starch helps the paint to adhere to the paper. I'll try that next time.

Sidney's using some tools from the kit to make patterns in the paint.

I started with a color story for each tray like red, yellow, orange in one tray and blue, green and purple in another tray.

This is April experimenting with all the colors.
I was worried that the starch would become too saturated with paint to be used but some of the paint sunk to the bottom and I freshened up the top with a bit more starch as needed. We were able to keep the same trays going for 3 hours.