The Accidental Artist

It recently occurred to me that I never officially announced that I am not going back to work - for now. I assumed most have you have inferred it, but if not, now you know. Timothy will be graduating in May and has accepted a position at the Thompson & Knight law firm in Dallas. So, as of May, we will be Texans. Yeehawww!

So we'll be living pretty frugally until that point. Which means that this Christmas, we had to get a little creative.

As I've mentioned previously, any opportunity to exploit our son in order to make or save money will be swiftly taken. So, being an art lover and an art maker, I decided to help him produce some fabulous works of art for our family members. I mean, I think he could blow his nose into a napkin and put a bow on it and they'd be ecstatic, so imagine if they received a custom work of art created by their little Alex Evans!

My first plan was to throw down some posterboard, strip him to his skivvies, and let him roll around in fingerpaints. So that is just what I did.

The experience was fun, but the resulting "art" left something to be desired. There was too much white space and the paints had a weird translucent quality that made the colors look weak. Plus, Alex didn't do as much of the work as we would've liked, and we spent most of the time trying to keep his paint covered hands out of his mouth. So we had to come up with a plan B.

Eureka! I had it. We would stick him in the jumperoo, put paint and canvases under his feet, and let him go to town. I know. Genius.

This time, I prepainted the canvases in red, yellow, and blue and used acrylics instead of fingerpaints. We made about twenty paintings and picked the most dynamic ones to crop and frame. The final products were amazing. Timothy and I were soooo excited about how they turned out and it was truly heart-wrenching to have to relinquish a single one. But alas.

I signed each of them with Alex's name and the year and noted that each was work 1 of 1. Our families went wild over them, as hoped. I even have requests for several more, which I don't mind doing since I'd like to make some for myself. I'm even considering making some to take to some local galleries and see if I can get people to buy art created by the feet of a five month old jumperoo fanatic...