Make It Monday: Everyone Is A Painter

They've got pieces of me all over and through them and I need only to put an idea before them and say 'Go!' and they do - with a kind of wild abandon that only comes with childhood and makes me strain against my own inhibitions to be a little more like them.

We had this great blank wall beside the piano.  It used to be covered by the ugly bookshelf but then I painted it and thought it was suddenly so pretty it had to be moved to a more visual area - thus, the looming blank wall.

So I combed the recesses of the barn and pulled a (mostly) unblemished piece of wood from a pile and brought it inside.  After a good scrub and sanding I pulled together our painting gear and called the kids with promise of a 'really fun project!'

1    We tore up some cardboard, exposing some of the corrugated guts, and glued that      down in various places to add texture.

2    The kids hammered bottle caps into the wood, added some foam stickers, and glued down some buttons - again, all to add texture and interest.

3  Painters gone wild! I just let them at it.  They each got a disposable plate with squirts of whatever colour struck their fancy and they went for it - no holds barred.  We're literally talking about paint flying through the air - I'm still cleaning it up off the floors.  The only real instruction I gave them was to make sure they didn't mush all the colours too much and please-please-please don't get it on the walls (which was totally in vain).

4    Once everything had dried, I sealed it.  I mistakenly bought the matte sealer instead of a glossy.  It did the job but while the painting was wet it seemed so much more dynamic and interesting and I really wanted to preserve that.  I may still go out and buy a glossy and spray it again just to reclaim some of that.

5    I painted the edges black to finish it off.  This should have been done first - I just didn't think of it until after the paint started flying across my dining room.

6    Name it!  Our is aptly titled: Colour Blind.

7    Hang and enjoy for all eternity. 

Happy painting everyone!

[NaBloPoMo Day 4]