Art fun!

The other night, I was working on a custom order when my son begged me to paint. I knew that if I started to paint with one child, the other 3 would want to as well. It was all or nothing... work or play... You would think the decision would be an easy one, but what if you consider your work to BE play?? It was more a question of "should I make a huge paint mess that I'll have to clean up to make my kids happy?" Ok... I guess the the decisions was still an easy one. We painted :).

I wanted to try my hand at making my own stencil. We used my go-to cardboard... cereal boxes! V traced some shapes on his piece. He ended up making a mask instead of a stencil, which I tried to explain the difference, but I'm not 100% confident that he understood what I was saying.

I decided to go for circles. I traced different sizes randomly onto the cardboard.

Then I cut them out with an exacto knife... which is not very much fun (fyi). My hand was cramping by the end... and it's a lot harder to cut out circles out than you might think!

After I gave myself a nice little hand massage, it was time to test out the new stencil! V used a spray... Uh oh, did you see that? We've been spotted!! The influx of children is about to commence!!!!!

Turns out that the spray made the cardboard a bit wet and soggy-ish. Hmm... I wonder if a coat of mod podge would create a barrier?? Oh, and I am using my new craft sheet underneath. What do you know... it really works!! It protects the table and is easy clean-up. Superb!

Patience is not a strong suit for me... so let's use a heat gun to speed up the drying process. Do you notice the price sticker on the heat gun? That's right baby... it was a thrift store find! Score!!!!

Enter the munchkins. Now it's time to really get down to art fun time. 

It's really quite an eye opening experience to paint with my kids. I love the wild abandonment that they use when painting and creating. They truly just try one thing after another. "Will it work? Who knows!! Let's just give it a try!!" I really need to follow their lead and paint this way.

Here are some finished pieces. We used paper, greeting cards, sketch book paper... whatever was in arm's reach. 

I just love the picture of the heart that loves "too much things." I mean... he is a heart after all, and is made for love :).

Here's my finished art journal page (it was my first one!). I made a heart stamp out of a piece of cardboard box, then I glued it onto the page. You can see the lime green circles in the background that I made with my new, homemade stencil. 

Bottom line, I'm so glad I painted with my kids!! These are the things that memories are made of... not working to fill an order. And like I wrote at the bottom of my page, "Creating frees the soul." Amen me... amen :P.