Monochromatist

Now that Maddie has gotten a little older, I've been trying to let her get bored a little bit more. Less structure, more opportunities to get creative.  And sometimes the most interesting things happen.

Tonight, when bored, Maddie headed to the watercolors. My little artist is quite the minimalist.

 She proceeded to paint page after page in a single color. After each one was finished, she would announce, "Yea! We got to the next level!"

 But my favorite part is the way that she is such a little lady when painting. Such a class act.

Yup, that's my girl! As a side note, she later had me bind these pages into a book and then proceeded to cut out princesses from a coloring book to affix to each page. Maybe she's more of an illustrator. Hard to tell really.

When Pigasso met Mootisse

***I chose this blog title only because Maddie has an obsession with that book and I have read it at least 30 times in the past week.

It's amazing to me what a difference a year makes. Last February I took a bunch of photos of Maddie coloring, something relatively new to her back then. This February I'm noticing so many changes in her artistic styles.

But first a look back. I must say, I've never shared these photos on the blog because I always thought I was going to do a new header with them. I still in my head keep thinking, well these pictures aren't really that old. Um, they're from January 2011. Ugh.These are some of my absolute favorite pictures of Maddie that I have taken yet.


*Back then, Maddie colored on construction paper, doing a lot of left/right switching. She loved to peel her crayons (much to my dismay -- Why ruin a perfectly lovely crayon?!?) If she couldn't peel the crayon by herself, she would hold it out and yell "Uh!" so that we would peel it for her. And there was a lot of huge scribbles, mostly of one color only.

This is my favorite photo ever. Not only do I love the pigtails (which she won't let me do any more) but I love what I call the "What did you say to me?" look on her face:

This child is awesome.

Flash forward one whole year and our art has really progressed to the princess phase.

Watercolor painting is a big hit around here. Maddie's not a big fan of showing off her art though.


Instead of the tough kid with the attitude that matches her pigtails, she's now quite the lady. She much prefers dresses and tutus to anything else and is very dainty as she does her art work.

In fact, here she is kicking up her back leg as she reaches for her markers. On the right, she's showing off her art work, which I know is a bit blurry, but boy oh boy, look at that cute girl!

Now then, the art itself, welllll.... A picture is worth a thousand words.

There's a lot of princess coloring books around here. As soon as we get one, she has me tear out every single page, so we always have a million papers floating around the living room. Then she colors them with markers. If she colors them herself (Big IF), she color blocks them. She's actually very good and staying in the lines or close to the lines. Often she'll have me color for her and delegate: "Mommy, color her arm green!" Usually I'll be coloring one and she'll add some final touches. Rob and I are a bit scared by her need to color everyone's eyes green or red and black our Snow White's mouth. Scary!


She's trying to teach Rob a thing or two, but we'll see how that goes.