Coloring Page – Beanie Pig

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints it. 

This week, it’s a Beanie Baby pig. 

My sketch…

and my daughter’s colorful painting.

   

I think circus when I look at this.  Be inspired.

 

Coloring Page – Week 10

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints it.

Despite my quest to produce more drawings tailored to children’s book publishing, these sketches are just too much fun for my daughter and I to give up.  Children’s paintings can be inspiring, and it’s especially refreshing to view art produced by a child that hasn’t yet been taught by an instructor to paint ”the proper way”.  It’s so easy and fresh.  Ah, it’s so unlike my own labored pieces… One of these days I’m going to take that art professor’s advice back in college — “Try some watercolor.”

My sketch,

and my daughter’s painting.

 

Coloring Pages vs. The Mood Files

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints it.

Well, enough of that easy cheesy life sketching stuff.  I got to get serious about creating work for my illustration portfolio!  So this is my idea:  Daughter will give me a subject as my source of inspiration and I’ll create a little story idea around it practicing my Bear and Pearl cats in different moods.  I’ll call it my mood file.

Yesterday my daughter handed me a small toy car (a tow truck with the tow part missing).  Here’s my little story concept, titled “I want that!”

 

This is my first experience of personifying a stuffed animal.  It was quite a bit of fun, especially dealing with the challenge of expression while keeping the button eyes.  The stripes in Bear should add a great deal, so I’d like to give it some color soon.  If my daughter is lucky, she’ll get to color one in too!

 

Coloring Page – Week 8

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints it.

This week, it’s a little red birdie with 2 fish friends.  I know, the fishies look like a couple of freaky disembodied heads.  It was Daughter’s choice for the drawing angle.   

My sketch…

and my daughter’s painting.

 

Coloring Page – Week 7

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints it.

This week it’s a pumpkin (based on a generic Halloween coloring page) with a Beanie Baby frog on top (daughter’s idea, of course).

My sketch

…and my daughter’s painting.

 

Coloring Page – Week 6

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints it.

This week it’s a hard object, a toy train.

It never fails to surprise me how a relatively simple object can be full of unexpected complexity.  When my daughter handed me this train my response was a slightly disappointed “really?”  I thought it wouldn’t provide enough of a challenge.  I was wrong! 

My sketch…

and my daughter’s watercolor painting.

 

Coloring Pages – Week 5

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints (or colors) it.

This week features a baby toy so colorful even the older kids can’t stop playing with the thing.  It’s a soft snail that has a bunch of feel-the-different textures, objects, mirror and such that all roll into a ball to make the mama snail’s back.

My sketch…

and my daughter’s coloring.

Big bro wanted one too after school.  Here’s the pose he requested.  You can tell I had a bit more time to work on his.  Baby was napping and not milling around me, crying that she wanted to hold my drawing subject!

And here’s his coloring.  Notice that he tested his pencils at the top and provided a record at the side of the colors he used, a la Mama Ella.

I really like the look of colored pencil on dark paper.  It really makes the colors glow.  Ha! It’s a glow worm!

 

Kitties at Play – With an Egg Timer

I gave myself 30 minutes.  Then I cheated and gave myself 15 minutes more to finish some highlights and background.  Still, quite a bit more “fresh” than the other one, no?  I really can’t decide which one I like better.  This one or this one? 

These are just too darn easy to draw realistic.  Though a lot of fun, I didn’t feel challenged in the least.  So I created the following scene to sketch — the kitties having some more complex fun and a human element as well.

I started loving the color rough, while I was working out the colors I wanted to work with.  That inspired me to go back and redo the two kitties.  There really is something nice about this one.  Hum, maybe I should give myself only 15 minutes next time…

 

Coloring Pages – Week 4, Plus a Confession

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints it.

This week it’s two of her Beenie Baby kitties at play.

Now here’s the confession.  I’ve secretly wanted to color in my coloring pages along with my daughter!  But watching the little ones paint left me with no time to do so.  Well, my littlest one napped while we did coloring pages yesterday, so I got my wish — sort of.  I copied my orange paper drawing through my ink jet printer onto yellow paper, which gave me a wonderful dark background to work upon with my colored pencils.  There I was, gleefully beginning to color when Daughter decided she was done painting for the day and wanted her cats back to play with — the very ones I was using as models! 

I had to wait until nighttime to pluck the kitties from her sleeping side to finish my drawing.  I intended a more loose style than some of my other finished drawings, but somehow it ended up all Jane Hissey.  Perhaps next time I need to set an egg timer to force myself to work quickly and finish quickly.  It’s just too easy to get carried away.  My goodness, stuffed animals are fun to color!

Daughter finished her painting today as well.  I think she was intimidated by the stripes and the 2 figures joined together.  She really gave up on the middle, but at least she had fun on the outer edges!

 

Coloring Pages – Week 3

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints it.

This week, it’s Beenie Baby snake and little Piglet.

Since school began, my kids have been collecting brown glossy seeds from a carrot wood tree outside my son’s classroom.  Each week, we’d end up with at least 3 empty food containers (pilfered from the lunchbox) filled with these seeds.  We attempted turning them into beads by drilling a hole in each seed, but that failed.  The soft inside is surrounded by an air space and the outside is a very thin casing.  When I tried drilling, they’d simply explode.  I thought we’d try the snake’s pattern with them (here mixed with a bag of miscellaneous old soup beans). 

Here’s what my daughter did:

Big brother liked the snake drawing, so I did one for him too:

And his decoration (cute tree, isn’t it?):

Here’s my little piglet drawing…

and my daughter’s painting.  I absolutely love her signature mark – splashing color at the bottom of the page:

 

Coloring Pages – Week 2

While the eldest is at school, my 3-year old daughter chooses the subject, I do a sketch, and my daughter paints it.

This week’s coloring pages feature her duckies and bunny. 

My sketch…

and my daughter’s painting:

My sketch…

and her painting:

 

While the Cats Away…

the mice will play!  While the eldest has been away at school, the girls and I have been painting.  Well they paint while I anxiously watch out for splatter on the walls, paint-loaded brushes getting too close to hair, and tipping over water jars.  The little one experiments with watercolor or a single acrylic color and gets to wear big brother’s apron.

I first do the sketch of one of my older girls’ ”animals” … 

and then she fills in with the paint.    It has become a custom coloring page that’s a whole lot more meaningful than a colored-in Thomas the Tank Engine!  I thought I’d turn my coloring sketches into a weekly feature on this blog. 

This week’s installment, The Purple Cat Beanie Baby, or as I like to call it, The Purple Cat-Bear Beanie Baby.

My sketch…

and my daughter’s painting:

She wanted to do a second coloring page later in the day.  I agreed, but I allowed only crayons and markers - this mommy only has the strength to supervise one painting a day.  After filling in some black spots, she stated she was just too tired to finish the coloring.  I thought the sketch was at least worthy of posting.

Leopard Beanie Baby: