Home Art Gallery

A brief tutorial on how to make a home art gallery – – –

A long time ago, when my kids looked like this:

We were living in another house where we had just built a surround thing for our fireplace.  I loved it!  But with it came a space above that faux mantel that needed something.  So the DIY in me had the kids paint – our very first family art gallery – –

Well, then we added more children, so over the years we just take a picture of the artwork, then paint over it.  I know I’m missing some pictures, but I’m giving up looking for them at the moment.  We recently renewed the gallery.

Here are some tips:

–paint the canvas to match what you want – – last round, I painted it to match the wall color.  This time, I painted them yellow to match furniture in the same space.

–give the kids only paint choices you want to use.  Above, the room was green so I gave them black and silver and pink (there were pink accents in flowers in that room).   This year we have a red couch and I pulled some other colors out of fabric I want to incorporate into the space.

–Paint somewhere that can get messy – we’re in the garage.  Side note – last time, a couple of years ago, I left my van in the garage – mistake!  I dropped a thing of paint, so while getting stuff to clean it up the baby at the time  was washing himself in the paint and smearing it onto my hubcaps.

–Wear things that can get ruined – pjs was our choice (and undies), but anything with do.

–I always add their names and year.  They want to do it, but I want it to be legible and crisp, so I tell them that’s a grown-up job.

–I had a whole talk on how you can paint without having to paint “something” – you know, trying to get them to go abstract instead of a picture of a dog.  We discussed patterns, lines, dots, etc.  All said they got it.  Immediately my daughter started drawing a girl and my preschooler was writing on hers – whatever, it’s their paintings (that’s the hardest part! let them do it all!)

–Take pictures of the process – it’s fun for them to look back on the paintings taking shape.

–Hang them up proudly!  Here’s our gallery:

–The last time we did this was about a year and a half ago – – here’s the post I wrote about it on my family blog….

Painting Paintings

I thought I’d be the fun mom today and have the kids paint. In our old home we had big canvas paintings from the kids above our fireplace. But now there are more kids, so they all needed to paint new ones. I spent the afternoon preparing the background, etc. This evening was the big event. It started with me dropping a giant container of tempra paint on the wood floors and splattering the walls in my entryway – oops! If you come to my house, just look past the slight blue tint beneath your feet. Then on to painting – I spent the whole dinner conversation coming up with different ideas – stripes, flowers, stars, dots, squiggles – you can see how I pictured something abstract. I was steering them away from doing a “picture” but that’s what they did in the end – oh well. Except for Abby who’s is a study of mud from what I can see. She loved mixing the colors – to mud. Will crawled around for his, enjoying the squish of paint. To come – pictures of the gallery.