Our mother-son art journaling alphabet project is still moving along. For more background on how this started, feel free to check out my previous blog posts
here,
here and
here.
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Left (Grady) :: Plunge(R)
Right (Me) :: Plunge! into the water |
We are having a lot of fun with words and our interpretations of them.
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Left (Me) :: Quake! facts
Right (Grady) :: Quake! picturing his father & his four-pack stomach & crazy morning hair |
Real life occurrences, like the
Napa earthquake, have influenced our word choices and have sparked unexpected conversations and future design ideas.
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Above (Me) :: REED
Below (Grady) :: REEDs + purple gallinule floating on the water |
My husband's mother's maiden name was Reid and his father's middle name is Reed. I wanted to name our unborn son Reed, but the name Grady ultimately stuck.
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Above (Me) :: Sublime
Below (Grady) :: SUBLIME = Rainbow sherbet sunrise on the water that morphed into an ice cream sunday |
Our word selections for the day conjure up the yummiest images and often instigates dessert planning for the evening ahead.
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Top (Grady) :: TRIUMPH! on the soccer field
Bottom (Me) :: Triumph is my name! |
Real life is seeping into our creative-filled mornings. A soccer victory and G's first goal in years found its spot on the page when we chose
Triumph as our word for the day last week. I experimented with a made-up girl named
Triumph and played around with color, shape, graphite pencils & I drew and painted without a pre-determined finish line.
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Left (Grady) :: Uprising as inspired by the Percy Jackson series
Right (Me) :: UPRISING golden sunrise |
After reading
this book about how different artists utilize their sketchbooks, we were inspired to give ours a little more time and attention. I was particularly moved by the colorful & graphic sketchbook pages of Madrid-based artist,
Pep Carrió, and his musings on why he keeps a sketchbook. His parting words were
My sketchbooks are my warehouses of memory. Oh, how I loved that concept.
We decided to paint several pages with different base colors and let them dry overnight. The result was a more layered and thoughtful approach, as we weren't trying to reach the finish line with our entry for the day in 15-20 minutes. Instead, we took our time. We just so happened to finalize our
Uprising paintings on 9/11. Grady's Empire State Building was inspired by a Percy Jackson book he was reading, but it just so happened to help us discuss the horrific events of 9/11 and recall where we were on that fateful day. I felt like my painting and interpretation of the word was hopeful and put a positive ending to our talks about life and loss, good and evil, what we believe in and how we should treat people.
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Top (Me) :: VIGOR
Below (Grady) :: Vigor inspired by the definition of the word |
Picking our word for the day has morphed in concept. What started out as a perusal of our household thesaurus has turned into a back-and-forth conversation about what words make us quickly visualize an image or what the true definition of the word is. We try to pick a word that we can quickly identify with and/or conceptualize almost immediately and get to work on it straight away.
This project is marrying my love of words and letters, children's art and color in the most wonderful way.
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