Painting Day

     What a great weekend!  I can't say I got much rest, but I did get a lot done.  I did things I needed to do, as well as things I wanted to do.  That, to me, is the measure of a good weekend.  I really covered my bases, too:  Saturday morning we went to Billy's first football scrimmage of the season.  Then I spent the day putting up tomatoes...tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, and tomato preserves.  Sunday started out with a dip in the pool with poolside cinnamon rolls.  Then I cooked a "Country Breakfast" for lunch.  That's what we call our traditional weekend breakfast which typically includes bacon, sausage or pigs in a blanket, biscuits, home made jelly, skillet potatoes, scrambled eggs, and orange juice.  There is no way we can handle this much breakfast during the week so we do it up big on at least one day of the weekend!  Harrison and I spent the afternoon painting together and after our beer can chicken dinner, Billy took the kids and I for a ride around the ranch.  I am ready now for another busy week!

     Now that we've got that covered, I'll get on to the really good stuff .  I recently wrote a post called "Artful Living" in which I talked about creating circumstances in your every day life to feed your creative soul.  Well, I have decided it may be helpful to others if I post some examples of how I feed MY creative soul while spending quality time with my family.  So here we go...

     Harrison is very much into animals right now and was asking me if I would help him draw some.  I am not very good at drawing, but I didn't want to let the little guy down so I said, "YES!" and quickly decided I could seize this moment for some creative time for myself as well.  We settled on painting an animal scene for his room and he began looking through his wildlife magazines and books to decide which animal we would paint while I got out our supplies and set up our work area on the screened in porch.

I really like this brand of acrylic paints.

The scene is set...fresh canvases, brushes, water.

Harrison and I made a list of all of his favorite animals.

Next I did some sketching to narrow down our choices.  I discovered very quickly that he was the creative art director and I was the one doing the work!  He IS his parent's son!  He prefers a more realistic look and I am better at whimsical, more abstract creatures, but we found a happy medium, FINALLY!

He chose this father lion and cub and wanted them under the shade of a big tree. I sketched them out on the canvas to give Harrison lines to work within.

We chose our colors and began mixing them to make the perfect shades for our lion family.

Next we chose the greens for our big tree.

The painting begins.

Harrison did a great job!  He has a very steady hand and quite the eye for detail.

I did some touch-up and painted on their faces.

Harrison decided we needed Mama Lion, too.  

Sister gets in on the action.

Proud little artist!

Harrison's new Lion Family painting for his room!  

This all took about an hour and a half, but is worth a lifetime of great memories.  It was a small thing that I was able to do with my child that fed both of our creative souls!

Em still has paint in her hair!