The Minpins: The Painting Day

Thursdays are our Painting Days, so after we finished our songs and stories for the day the kids ran to the table to pull on their smocks. (Painting days are kind of a big deal. They involve PAINT, after all.)

We talked a little bit about our Minpin story again, and Ernie described everything she could about the Gruncher. It's a terrible, huge, smoke-breathing monster. The smoke is orange. (The smoke comes from the huge fire in the monster's throat/belly: he likes his food cooked, you see, so he cooks it on the way down. Pretty efficient!) We all set out to paint our very own Gruncher monsters.

Mimi, at first, pitched a royal fit because I want the girls to learn to share. Yes, I gave them ONE tray of paints to work from. Well, she just couldn't cope with that and resorted to painting her paper with her water and paper towel, before she deigned to reach for the color closest to her: brown. She had quite the puddle of water going on! It was kind of fun to see the paint swirling around on her page, and once again: I heart my oilcloth tablecloth. Oh, and laminate floors. They're indestructible.

(A note about the paint tray--you can see it in the pictures above. It's a plastic tray that used to hold ice-cream filled mochi. We have another tray with much smaller dimples, that used to hold ferrerro rocher candies. The water cups -- which you can't see-- used to hold apple sauce. I seem to have a garbage fetish when it comes to supplies for my kids.)

We talked a little about color theory too, as I mixed up green and orange paint for our monsters and trees. Ernie wanted a darker blue, so she mixed black into her blue paint.

Mimi's final product. Wonder Daddy pointed out that her Gruncher has a mouth! A great, big, gaping mouth. Yipes, scary!

Ernie's Gruncher, in red. The fellow with a yellow head and blue body is Little Billy. The structure on the left is the large tree that Little Billy climbed, and the red on the bottom, with the red dots, is the "carpet of strawberries." The leader of the Minpins, Don Mini, described the forest floor as being carpeted with strawberries, and Ernie took him at his word! She said that the strawberries would all melt and get hard, to make a carpet. Alright then. (Oh dear. The Gruncher is not bleeding- it seems I didn't let him dry sufficiently before hanging up the painting, and the paint dripped.)

I was happy to see that Ernie, at least, was OK right away with sharing paints, and also to see how much detail she'd retained from reading the story together. She's starting to get the hang of working with a paint brush- strokes, not scribbles. When she's 100% kind to her plastic art brushes, I'll move her to my nicer bristle brushes in varying sizes and shapes.


Paints are tempura, paper is construction paper from Ikea, as are the art smocks