Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Cabin Fever Therapy

Flu is making its way through our household, disrupting our March Break plans and, after 6 days of being home with sick kids, inspiring heightened levels of when-will-spring-come cabin fever.
Yesterday was a sort of undifferentiated blur of chores, meals, and deep sighs from the most ill child, a sort of "groan[ing] too deep for words."
Today, I had to inform the kids that our planned trip to see dear friends was called off, which left everyone in the house out of sorts. Was sickness and sniping all we'd take away from our week off?
Fortunately, I have a three part formula for turning around blah, boring days. Screens are all turned off until every child has met three conditions:
1. Spend some time outdoors.
2. Do something helpful for the family.
3. Do something creative.
Since I also felt in need of reset, I dug through my arts and craft supplies and realized I still have a largeish canvas left over from a spate of family art projects several years ago. Why not get the kids involved helping me fill this one?
It took a little discussion to decide what to put in our painting, but fortunately, there is one topic we are all quite enamoured of--our puppy, Brynn.

While the kids painted smaller pictures of their own, I sketched out the proportions in a favourite photo of Brynn, then lightly blocked it out on canvas.

The kids helped me fill in the blocked out shapes with base colour. Then I added detail to the figure of Brynn while they added grass and dandelions to the background.


It needs a touchup here and there once it is dry, but I'm pretty happy with it. More importantly, this just became "the time we painted that picture of Brynn" instead of "that time we were all sick and didn't get to go on vacation."

3 comments:

Melanie Bettinelli said...

Very nice! Way to save a bad day!

Zina said...

Love the painting!

Kate said...

Thanks!

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