My Son the Artist

**This is one of those posts that, as a Mom, is important for me to document. I really don't think the rest of the world will be interested, so feel free to skip over this if it isn't your thing.

The Boy has really gotten back into his artwork again lately. He went through a phase when he was younger when he LOVED to draw with his crayons and he did it all the time. But like most phases, he sorta moved on. But lately he is back into it. With a VENGEANCE!

He uses all mediums...crayons are generally his "go to" thing, but lately he has gotten into colored pencils and, most recently, watercolors. I don't want to forget how very much he loves to create and when he gets older I want to be able to look back and remember some of his first creations. Here he is this weekend creating a masterpiece with water colors:

And here is the scanned final product of that exact creation that he was working on in the above picture... I love all the different colors that he uses.
And he loves to mix the colors together to see what new color they make. The Virgo in me cringes every time he takes his paint brush and puts it in the yellow section and then moves it over to the purple section and then the brown section before finally putting it on the paper. I think to myself, you are messing all the colors up!!! But I just smile and tell him it is beautiful and ask him what color he will create next. Then I leave the room so I don't have to witness the chaos of colors. :)

Here is another creation he did this morning. He says to me, "Mommy I do this one for you because you like all the bright colors." (I think that might be because when he mixes all the colors together everything comes out brown, so I love it when he leaves the colors in their natural state and I can see him mix them on the paper and create different things with the different colors).
He has also learned that when he puts a color on the paper and then dips his brush back into his water glass and then puts it back on the color, it becomes lighter. He spent several different pieces of paper making each color lighter and lighter until the entire paper was just soaking wet with a hint of color...

The next one is here simply because I have thousands of pieces of paper just exactly like this one scattered all over my house. It is a spider. With lots of legs. And a pincher on the top of his head. He draws them in all shapes and sizes and colors. But this is it. Just one spider per page, in one color. Then he rips out the page and goes on to the next one. Only to draw the exact same thing in a different color, maybe a slight variation in size, but virtually the same thing. I am not kidding when I tell you there have been hundreds of these.
And finally, one of my favorites. This should be "landscaped" rather than "portrait," but I guess blogger doesn't want it to be that way. So you will have to improvise. The two things on the left (top) are "our family." Those are two people, me and him supposedly, and I am on the far left (top) and he is next to me. If you look closely you will notice that he is "shooting his web" at the "bad guys" who are coming near us. He has them all "wrapped up in his web" so that he and I are safe.
I love this for so many reasons. First of all I love that he is drawing his own representations of our family on paper (and for the record, usually there are three of us so he does usually include his sister. He told me that she wasn't there in this picture because it was dangerous and he didn't want her to be around the danger when he had to protect us all). And second of all it is so sweet to me that, even at his young age, he is trying to be the big protector for me. He made sure to point out that HE was the one shooting the web at the bad guys and that I was safely tucked away beside him where they couldn't get me. It must be some in-born thing that a little boy feels like he has to protect his Mommy. But I have spent his entire existence feeling like I was protecting him from the world, so it is nice to have the situation reversed for once.

I hope he always loves to be creative and expressive. I know that I will ALWAYS encourage it. I will always find the money for crayons and paper and paint. He will always be allowed to draw and to express himself. And I just love watching what he does with it.