My Budding Artists

Sometimes I wonder why I ever bother to decorate anything before having lived in a house for a full year. It isn't until then that I have firm ideas about what I want to do. Everything done before then is with a vague perception of what I might think I like. That being said, we started over in the girls' room.

The walls were a raspberry pink. But only the top half, because I was going to put up bead board on the bottom half. The bead board sat in the guest room for six months while I dragged my feet. Finally, after the tornadoes of April, and while the power was still out and I was DUE to have a baby, I repainted the walls. They are now a soft bluer-than-aqua aqua color.

Honestly, I won't go into great detail over this. I have just a few more touches to finish up and I intend to do an entire post on the girls' room. I think it's pretty awesome, and they LOVE it.

The focus of this post is one of the projects Sarah Grace and Elizabeth have done.

I've had these two canvases for several years. I can't even remember what the original purpose was. Browsing around online had given me some inspiration and I talked to the girls about my plan.

They were delighted!

On an errand to Hobby Lobby, I picked up several colors of paint (and hooray! it was on sale!!) and a variety pack of paint brushes (and hooray! I used a 40% off coupon!!).

The girls and I spent some time contemplating designs and finally the afternoon came when I drew (and erased as needed) with a pencil on the canvases. Then I traced over the drawing with a Sharpie to make the lines easy for the girls to see.

And then, we squirted paint onto the lids of plastic butter tubs and the girls went to it!

We talked about what should be painted first and discussed colors and paint brush techniques (of which I only know, well, none) and the girls were a study in diligence.


Sarah Grace had definite ideas about how to do things, while Lizzie was simply content to go with it and take direction from me or Sarah Grace.


In the end, the girls carefully painted the images and I blotted on the back ground color. Then we sprayed them with a protective coating and hung up the artistic perfection.

Art by Sarah Grace

Art by Elizabeth

Actually, they sat on top of the girls dresser for a week or so before I got around to hanging them. But that is simply a function of a scatterbrained Mommy of five, right?