The Pure Joy of Painting

This week the Tel Aviv class has been focusing some time on creating portraits and exploring who we are and what we look like. Yesterday we read a fabulous book called, The Colors of Us. Which tells the story of a girl who goes through her town and compares different skin tones to different delicious food, honey, nutmeg, curry, chocolate, etc.

 On the art table we had lots of different skin toned paints for kids to choose or mix to find one to paint their own self-portirts. Hannah and Lily were eager to come over and play with paint. Lily picked one she liked and started on a painting but Hannah was more interested in mixing and experimenting with the colors. She and I mixed a few colors and after we found a color we liked I would paint a little on her hand to see if it matched. It was neat to work with Hannah to try to figure out what color was needed to get the color we wanted. At one point we added a bit too much orange......Anyway after her whole hand was covered with paint I suggested she make a handprint. Then she looked up with big excited eyes and slapped her hand on a piece of paper.

 Before I knew it both Hannah and Lily were both painting their hangs and creating wonderful hand art on every piece of paper they could find. The giggling was uncontrollable. After a few minutes of quickly going through lots of tiny sheets of paper I suggested they take their hand out to the easel. First they shared a side but Hannah wanted to hit the easel to make prints and Lily wanted to rub the paint in circles. So they each had their own side to paint in the way they wanted and the giggling continued. Even though we didn't stick to the project the way we had intended to, it was wonderful to see the pure joy that came from playing with paint and how the paint was able to facilitate a wonderful bonding activity for Hannah and Lily. I realized that we hadn't had paint out for awhile and that it was wonderful that the girls just wanted to play and explore the medium without any sort of structure, maybe they will be up for a structured project in a few days, maybe not, but either way we  hope to have more paint out in the upcoming weeks and we are excited for a whole room full of giggles : )