Child art – oil paintings

I tend to do whatever is current for me; in some form or other, with my little granddaughters. Last year it was drawing houses and this year it is mini oil paintings for their Christnmas presents to their Mum and Dad.
The girls took photos of flowers in their garden in July  (forward planning on my part). I cropped them into 10cm squares in Photoshop for easy copying. Here are the photos they chose from the 30 – 40 they took.

We began preparing the blocks of MDF (10cm square and 12mm deep) in November, by painting in gesso then rubbing a background of green oils on top a couple of weeks later.

They painted the final pieces in two 20 minute sessions, (!) doing the final touches – middles of flowers – in a few minutes on a third session. I know it took 20 minutes because my timer was out on the window sill and Isabel set it. Children work delightfully fast.

They painted in the kitchen and I pre-mixed the colours. I am far too stingy with my artist-quality paints to let them loose with colour experimenting. They’ll just have to learn colour mixing later with their own paints.  So I mixed a series of greens and they copied the photos to do the backgrounds.

The following week I mixed a series of pinks and let Izzy loose on the aqualegia. I sometimes demonstrate something – on paper like how to do one-stroke petals. For the daisy I mixed impasto into the paint to make it thick. But they are still quite assertive about how they want to paint their flowers. And of course with all the nasty stuff you need in oils, like turps, I cleaned up after them while they went off to play!

Their mother and father were delighted and will put these somewhere on a narrow wall.

PS I’m still doing my rather long introspective looking back at 2015 – only one more to go;  looking back at my flower painting for 2015. I’m very excited about where I plan to go for 2016 so will share this in due course.