Family {Art} Day

Our province is blessed to have a designated "Family Day" as an official holiday in February. This year, my husband and I decided it would be fun to do a family art project. Since our children range in age from 3-12, it was a bit of a challenge to come up with something we could all do simply and successfully. I figured we could each create a square with a series of concentric paper circles and put them all together, along the lines of  Kandinsky's Colour Study of Squares . (I got the idea from Art Projects for Kids, a very inspiring site!)My dh had the brilliant idea of taking it a step further and telling each person to select one paper to represent each member of our family and then decide how to order the circles on their squares. We have lots of scrapbooking paper, so the selection was vast. It was so fun to see what each person chose to represent themselves and others in the family -- and fun to GUESS before they explained each choice! (Interestingly, three people independently chose purple paper to represent me -- largely because of my love of lavender oil, which I use for just about everything :)

Unfortunately, the pictures I took during the process of our family art day mysteriously disappeared (and we can't blame the dog --- oh, but that's another story!!!). I would have liked to show you the work in progress. However, I'll have to settle with just showing the finished product and each person's part of the product.

Here's the finished product -- with a dark wash to unify the whole piece. I was a bit disappointed that we lost some of the "pop" of the coloured papers with the wash, but I'm still really pleased with the results. (BTW -- it's not really as lopsided as it looks. I had trouble taking a good picture of it on the wall, and couldn't crop it quite right!)

This is my youngest daughter's square -- lots of pink and sparkles to suit her tastes, but still representative of the people in our family. (For example, the buses represent her youngest brother's love of playing with cars and trucks.)

Next is my husband's. I especially like the "social butterfly" paper with the princess castle that he chose for your youngest daughter.

Here is our 3 year-old son's piece. He really chose and cut all the papers by himself! (He used a special circle cutter for the one that is perfectly shaped, which happens to represent Daddy.) He loves to roar and growl like a tiger, which is why he chose the lion to represent himself :)

Next is the work of our 11 year-old son. He's not fond of working with scissors, so he used the circle cutter for all his papers so they'd all be exact. He chose to place the circles in order of age, the oldest (me) being the base. It's not hard to guess that the monkey represents his little roommate, who's always "messing with" his stuff! LOL

Here is our 12 year-old daughter's square:

And finally, my square. I chose to tear all my circles just to be different ;) The smallest circle with the horse represents my oldest daughter, who loves to ride and is also an enigmatic patchwork quilt of colourful emotions and ideas. The circle with the sports pennants represents my 3 year-old son who loves to go-go-go and is always shouting things like "yippee!" Everyone was stumped by the next circle. The blue and green buildings are significant because those are my 11 year-old son's favourite colours, and he loves to build things. The smoke clouds also remind me of the speech bubbles he incorporates into almost all of his drawings. Behind that is a coloured coffee filter which I made with my youngest daughter. She loves art and colour, so I thought it was a good opportunity to make use of the little creation we'd made together months earlier. The page of text represents me, as I love to read and write, and the gold paper with the embossed man overseeing the whole piece represents my husband, who is solid gold to me and a wonderful head of our household.

So, that's what we did with our family day this year. I'd be thrilled to hear of any ideas that you have for making family memories with art -- or anything else! Please leave a comment with your ideas:)