Happy New Year for 2015

Happy New Year! I hope you all feel resplendent and were really spoilt this Christmas.

Don’t forget the swatch swop! I need to know that you are taking part by 5th January and I need the swatches by the 15th January. All the instructions can be found by doing “search” top right hand corner and typing in ‘swatch-swop’. (note spelling and hyphen).

I have not yet caught up with my usual new Year stock-taking so in the meantime, I’ll tell you about the house portraits my two little granddaughters (8 & 6 yrs) did for their mother’s Christmas present. They have painted houses on holiday in Cornwall and their uncle’s house in Sweden. Time to paint their own for a Christmas gift for their Mum.

We started off looking at patterns of bricks on an old listed house in my village. This was to tune them into the way bricks are laid, as the pattern qualities of these are great! We had little squares of paper to do Indian ink drawings followed by watercolour washes. It  works well having a left hander and a right hander, as they can share a board between them for the ink.
You can really sense their concentration.

Here is Hattie carefully doing ‘alternating patterns’ on the bricks.It was a lovely summer’s day in late August and it was a few weeks before we could start  the real project and we had to keep it a secret!

When I do art with children, I try to stick with my ‘rules’

• Excellent quality materials
• Decent sized paper (between A3 and A2)
• Media that will captivate their interest (such as dip pens and ink) and water-colour washes.
• A drawing that can’t be erased, ensuring that they draw with confidence – they have never questioned this one!
• Drawing from careful observation
• Discussion about what we can see

In this project I became aware of the 6-year old being concerned about smudging, while the 8 year old who has a very different personality got stuck in not worrying, and as the afternoon passed drew faster and more casually! The photos are all of the 6-year-olds’ brick-studies.