Painting in the sun

As consolation for his not being old enough to go lap swimming, I spent yesterday's lovely afternoon with my eight year old and a big box of paint. We had a frabjous day sitting on the patio creating works of indescribable beauty. He has asked me not to post photos of him or his work, but here's a few snaps of what I made.

The workspace.

Nice fun graphic effects with just some rubber stamps and bright fabric paints.

A few things I tried with Pebeo Setacolor paints (a la Mickey Lawler's painting class). I got this amazing lettering effect by laying a sheet of die-cut scrapbook paper over the fabric as it dried in the sun (in the background of the workspace photo above). I bought a few sheets of this paper on clearance last year just to try this, and I love how it turned out -- exactly what I was hoping for! Now, to get a little better mixing colors...

Close-up of shaded lettering

I did some numbers too. This is a blue that even I would use!

Child the Younger mixed this sunny orange; we achieved the "scale" effect by laying a plastic pizza box liner (thanks, Jeannie!) over the paint as it dried in the sun. We have plans to try this in the future using greens and greys in an attempt to achieve more realistic scales. There are a lot of dragon-centric artistic decisions among the under-10 set around here.

The back is lighter, but the scaling effect still shows.