Art . . . Blocks . . . And More Art!

Finally this morning we had Iain over again. No vacations, no floods, we could at last do some of the activities we'd planned! My idea was to do gardening, but Josephine had waited for five days to do an art project with Iain, so she insisted. I had some little pieces of contact paper cut into small squares (I don't remember why now), so I put them out on the table with anything I could find to stick onto them--die-cut pieces of paper, silk leaves, ribbons, feathers, cut up comics, etc. In no time both Jo and Iain decided what they would make and they each set to work.

This is actually incredibly exciting, as Iain has not exactly been the most prolific artist. If he ever comes to the art table, his art can best be described as minimalist. Yes, process over product, but believe me when I say there was not much of either before.

But today he filled up nearly the whole sheet and THEN wanted to write on the leaves as well!

When he was done, he asked for blocks that he could "build tall and knock down." I took out the wooden blocks, but that was not what he wanted. He said they were colored, so I took out the colored blocks. Nope. I asked what color they were, and he said, "Squarey." Aha! Though he probably hasn't seen them for at least nine months, I have a bunch of large blocks I had made out of half-gallon milk cartons and covered with checkered contact paper. I went to the garage to get one, and bingo! That was exactly what he wanted.

After building several towers and excitedly knocking every one down,

he got serious and constructed an elaborate set of train tracks that went underneath a bridge and included even a switch.

This whole while, however, Josephine was still working on her collage.

She had decided to use the small white hearts to make a "Valentines collage." She then colored each heart with markers, and methodically laid each onto the sheet in a pattern (pronounced patterin by our resident artist) which she followed all the way to the end.

How fun to see such completely different masterpieces! Iain later on asked for beads, as he wanted to string together a necklace. I was surprised enough that he did a collage, but asking to do something else was more than I ever imagined!