Monday, March 8, 2010

Painting with the kids

When our daughters were young, I would occasionally take the time to show them how to draw or paint something – with varying degrees of success. ‘Success’ being anything from the modest triumph of spending a couple of hours without anyone getting yelled at to that wonderful time after I showed them how to paint plaid and every painting they did for two months had people with plaid clothes. And plaid houses too, come to think of it.

It has taken me a lot of years of ‘painting with the kids’ to figure out it’s better if you don’t ‘help’ them too much – maybe even limiting the help to wiping paint off their arms from time to time.

Painting a picture together is always fun. Ideally, everyone does what they’re best at, which in my case usually meant the kids did the people and the cars and trucks.

And guess what? That still seems to be the case! The grandson who did this Pepsi truck in Dubai 12 years ago is going to give me a hand with the people in my graphic novel! I’ll show you how the first couple of pages of Chapter 6 turned out in a couple of days.