Child's Art Center

I can't take credit for this idea. It originated with my daughter and all I get credit for is the hanging of the letters, clipboards and pictures. My daughter has a large living room and one corner was not being used so she decided to turn it into an art center for her child.

She has a child sized table with two chairs with a cute caddy full of colored pencils. On an opposite wall is a chest that has paint supplies, paint smock, markers, stamps and ink pads.

Art work can easily be displayed and rotated on 6 clipboards that are hanging on nails. Ummm yeah some of the artwork isn't exactly all the little one's...Dad and Mom got in on some of the coloring too.

The letters are from Michaels. They are a basic white but acrylic paint quickly changed that. It did take a couple of coats of paint to cover the white though. The letters have a key hole cutout on the back for hanging. Some of the "better" artwork is framed in white frames. The unframed piece is on a canvas stretcher board. These pieces can be changed out over time...just not as easily as the clipboard ones. A clever solution to displaying the work of the little artist. His eyes just lit up when he saw his artwork on display.

Unleashing My Creativity

When my art quilt group met in April we did slow blind contour drawing. It was an exercise from this book that involved drawing a still life slowly following the contours of all of the shapes with your eyes but not looking at your paper as you drew. Doing this exercise takes the left brain out of the picture. The left brain is bossy and wants to label everything and rationalize everything, while the right brain wants to play and explore and experiment. The right brain doesn't care about words or logic. If you can shut up the left brain then you can unleash your creative self....even if you think you don't have one.

This is the drawing I came up with while doing the exercise. For May's meeting we were to pick a section of the drawing that we wanted to enlarge and work with.

I picked this portion of the blind drawing and enlarged it. The next step was to trace or copy the enlarged drawing onto watercolor paper and paint it.

This is my painting. I don't know anything about watercolors...other than using water with the paint. In fact I don't know anything about art...I wasn't the one in my family to get the artistic talent. I wish I had more talent. Maybe if I keep doing the exercises in the book I can unlock my inner artist and be more creative.

I think I will go back to the watercolors and add some layering and see what happens. I would like to figure out how to blend the colors better too. The next step from here would be to design a quilt off of this painting. I'm not sure about doing all of those petals on the flower, but I think it would make an interesting quilt.