The Beauty of Color: Episode I

I was in an interesting place the other day, where I knew the floors needed scrubbed badly, but I just didn't feel the urgent need to get it done. So I fixed that by saying, "Hey, guys, would you like to do some body/feet painting before bath tonight?" I figured, with paint all over the floor, I would have to scrub it well. And the way I see it, if I have to clean it, I might as well give myself the joy of being able to really see the reward to my job well done.

For Maxwell, this was his first time digging in to the painting scene, but you would have never known it. He has watched his brother and sister, and from the minute I set everything out on the counter he was stretching to get his hands on a brush, yelling and bouncing up and down. Once I got him stripped down and into a disposable diaper, the party was on. We started with left over face paints, which were slightly dried out from last painting day, so I dipped the brush in the paint for him, told him to paint his tummy, and he immediately did just that.
He had just as much fun playing with the paints on the brush as he did painting himself.


We had music on (Christmas songs, thanks to Bella), and things got a little wild for a bit with dancing and singing.

Then he decided to try his hand on another canvas - his brothers tummy!

Next I rolled out the white wrapping paper for some feet painting, but Max thought he needed more color on himself, so the acrylics went on the tummy and hands as well. He got really excited at one point, squealing and shaking his paint-saturated hands.

We used some nice bright colors, but in the end everything ends up one color anyhow. Hard to believe it starts with these colors and ends up lime green all over the paper...

Maxwell did finally decide to put a little on the paper.

As you can see, he ended up mostly brown at the end of it all.
It took one good muddy-water rinse before they could all be bathed.

Apparently Max was really thirsty, because he was trying to scoop the water into his mouth with his hands, then gave up on that to try this. He had never attempted this before.

You would think that washable face paints would wash off, but maybe the super-concentration from them drying out some made that pigment a little more resilient than the last time we used them. Max was covered in lovely pastel patterns for the following day. I think I'll just stick to my acrylics from now on.
There are so many more wonderful pictures, some of which I will share with you in Episode II, featuring Bella and Kane. There were just too many to include here. But if you are interested in seeing them all, you can hop on over to my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturemama/. I would love to have you, and I am downloading the images as I type. I hope to see you/hear from you there!

Edited to tell you that my uploader just crashed, so it will take me awhile to reload all of the pictures and relabel them all. Drat. It has taken me three days to get to where I could download them! But they will be there eventually...