My 2 year old can paint that

As a mother constantly trying to think of ways to help her daughter learn and grow, I eventually thought of introducing my daughter to art activities. We started out with Crayola paint brushes that came in an easy grip roller ball format, but she was probably a bit too young at 1.5 years old to appreciate it. She kept painting herself instead of using paper so we put those paints away. She almost gave her nanny a heart attack one time when she painted her face, hands and knees red. Her nanny thought she injured herself .

Then she turned two and discovered coloring books and crayon. It worked well for awhile, she would just color and color zigzagging lines on the coloring book but eventually she got curious about the crayons and started biting them off, so goodbye crayons!

We decided to go back to paints again since she has a better grip now and I'm happy to report that we've stuck to the painting activity almost every day now. We bought her basic supplies such as an art smock to keep her clean while painting, a thick roll of plain paper from IKEA (instead of buying reams of A4 or short bond paper), a set of washable paints in little tubs plus a paint brush from Crayola and a paint palette.

  

The budding artist :)

She still gets dirty since she uses her fingers to paint sometimes but at least the paints are washable. The paints are slightly expensive, about SGD7 (or about P200+) for a 6-tub set so we've been trying to ration them out so we don't have to buy very often. We tried using the paint palette but it's difficult to estimate how much she's using. We also tried to cut down on the number of paint tubs available to about 3 at a time but then she loses interest if she has fewer colors to paint with. We also thought we found this great deal on paints when we saw a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse set of washable paints going for SGD1 but the paints weren't as washable as the Crayola ones and you had to screw back each tub cap after use. It was also hard, virtually impossible, to unscrew the tub caps if any paint got stuck on the cap. So we're back to the more user-friendly Crayola paints.

The only good thing about using those Mickey Mouse Clubhouse paints though is that they were so thick, she was able to use more of it to paint and she covered enough paper so we could frame it. It looked like an abstract painting.

Lexi's painting

It reminded me of this documentary about a little girl who painted abstract art which was so good it attracted the attention of a renowned art dealer who eventually sold the girl's paintings for thousands of dollars. The girl was only 4 years old. Now I'm not saying we have a little Jackson Pollock on our hands, but we might as well have art on the walls that have meaning for us. And if that art's going to come from my 2 year old, then so much the better.