Learning how to paint with 4 children

Everything takes time.

We hear this often as children when we’re growing up. Then we repeat it to our children as parents needing them to understand that elusive thing called patience. This sentiment about learning that things/people/plants/processes evolve in their own time is what comes to mind when I think of how long it has taken me to feel like I can manage a painting activity when I’m on my own with the munchkins. After plenty of painting mishaps when there were only 3 of them, I felt extremely wary about facilitating painting with the 4 of them when Revelation was born.

In the last few weeks though, I’ve experimented with collaborative painting activities. The biggest things I shifted in my painting-with-small-children practice is that I removed all water from the process! This has made allllll the difference. The reason painting was so wild and chaotic in previous years—when the oldest 5!— was because I was giving them each their own water cups to clean brushes. Now instead we use old rags or paper towels, or they don’t even care about clearing paint off the brush because their real joy is in mixing all the colors up anyway!

Assorted colors mixed by Wonder and Mommy for the lowercase alphabet wall.

This is Revelation’s first time getting to paint—and he’s nearing 2 1/2 years old. Once it occurred to me that I didn’t need to complicate the already full labors of painting with 4 munchkins by adding water to the mix, a whole new world of possibility opened up. Suddenly group painting projects felt like something I could do when I’m on my own with them.

Another simplifying factor that made painting more accessible was taking the paint party to the floor. Trying to paint at the table was often too difficult to navigate. They didn’t have all the space they needed to work. Unnecessary squabbles about people infringing on other people’s space popped up—draining me of the little bit of energy I’d actually set aside for the intensity of the activity!

Mommy holds the “e” letter stencil while Revelation guides his paint brush to form the letter “e” on the wall.

Moving to the floor gave them more room to spread out. It also saved me from countless trips to the floor to retrieve runaway brushes and slippery paper-canvases. Being on the floor gave them better control over their materials and more space to engage with their explorations.

Once I realized this 6-pack of acrylic paints was able to support us in many artistic adventures, I finally had all the pieces in place to add the lowercase alphabet wall to the collection. The uppercase wall was done months ago. The chaos and stress of that attempt at a group painting was a lot to process. Yes, I had water then too. If only I had just figured out that we could paint without water.

Also, I hadn’t preset the stencils on the wall, and eager munchkins were impatient with each letter having to be positioned one at a time. Fights raged on as people forgot their place in the painting queue. Mysterious paint streaks of blue and orange landed on sheets, tables and other parts of the wall. A wailing Revelation protested from the carrier on my back—the entire time!— because he too wanted to paint.

Still, the wall turned out great with all of that, and they loved it. They kept asking when were we going to finish the lowercase set too, and I couldn’t tell them when. I knew I’d need to think of a smoother process first.

Wonder enjoys seeing how the hot pink paint he mixed looks on the wall as he adds “t” to the alphabet wall.

Gradually as the months passed, and the seasons changed, a whole new approach for the lowercase wall was emerging. It all came together in a moment when I wasn’t looking for it, and I was curious and open to a new experience unfolding.

This time we were starting the process with ONE munchkin! James had taken everyone else to the library, and Wonder didn’t want to go. It was the perfect moment to get our paint process going. Finding one-one-one moments with each munchkin is an experiment and a wobbly dance with time, energy, and resources. Some days moments appear unexpectedly—like on this day—and you roll with it.

I taped all the stencils on the wall. Then we mixed our paint colors. Beginning with “z,” we alternated painting letters, so that we could remove the stencils as we went along. We were in a nice groove, and I was noticing how much softer the painting process was with one munchkin. It seems obvious enough, but rarely am I doing something with only one child in mind. I was happy that I had everything ready to go to make the most of my time with Wonder.

Revelation and Jubilee “enhance” Mommy’s painting without her knowledge while she is putting dinner on the table. Filmed by Bloom, a willing collaborator it seems.

We made it all the way to “j” before the rest of the munchkins came home and discovered the paint party going on. Of course they all wanted a turn, and wanted to paint on the wall, and wanted to do it now, now. now! My quiet painting moment with Wonder was upended in a second, and he slipped out of the room while his siblings took over the process. Later though, he came back to document some of the process with my phone, and so we have some pictures of our process in action.

I am celebrating the discovery of a painting practice in our family learning lab! It’s been a long time coming, for sure! I enjoy that it’s something I can facilitate when I’m the only adult around, and that it creates an engaged-and-seated interlude from their usual frequency of bouncing, running, and jumping. Also, last night I was really excited to finally paint my own picture during our process. It was fun to show them that there are so many more colors to mix when you use a dab of white in red, or a touch of yellow to green.

“Family House, One Day”, Mommy’s colorful abstraction of a dream for a house that is bigger and has lots of space and grass for munchkins to play outside all the time.

There will be more painting explorations to come. We are just getting reacquainted with the possibilities. I am grateful for washable paint materials, and an abundance of things to paint on in the meantime. Now when they ask, “Can we paint?”, I don’t feel a wave of anxiety about how am I going to hold all parts of the experience together without getting paint everywhere.

Every art medium makes something more possible that wasn’t possible another way. The magical powers of the colors that can slide, and bend, and swirl and mesh together is fascinating every time. The smoothness with which you can blend and reconstruct whole worlds with the stroke of a brush—it never gets old. With painting there’s always a new journey for us to discover, and we never know exactly where the colors, and shapes, and densities of shade will take us. I feel we’ll be turning to painting as a family practice more and more. I am grateful we are finding a rhythm with it.