Raine Moments: Paintlounge

I must really like Paintlounge because we went back for the third time yesterday. The first two times I've gone, I've painted this and this. Today my husband and I decided to take our little girl there for the first time. I've been telling her so much about the place and it's only fair to bring her there for the experience :). I was also very curious of what she'll end up painting.

Since there was a paint bar, we let our little girl choose what colours she would like on her palette. (While the paints are acrylic, we knew that our young daughter wouldn't put it in her mouth and we had really close supervision of her too.) Then we let her choose the tools to use. She began with the paintbrush as seen here.

Later, she moved on to use about 20 other tools (a variety of stamps, sponges, fly swatter, mats, ball) to make her mark making on the canvas. I would say her painting was an experimentation of tools rather than a representational painting of something in real life as my husband and I asked many times to tell use about her painting and she didn't say anything about it.

What I really enjoyed about the experience was seeing my daughter show her own creative expression. She chose her own colours, she kept going back for her own tools, and she told us when she was done painting. As much as my husband and I liked how the initial painting looked and wanted to take the painting before my daughter added more to it, we didn't, of course.

I believe that art is where one creatively express themselves and it doesn't matter what the product ends up looking. It's all about the process, the journey that makes me love art so much. I think this is why my art tends to stray far, far away from a reproduction or copy of anything...if I wanted to paint an exact copy of a picture, why wouldn't I just go get a photo printed from the nearest photo centre? :) Copying a picture is good practice for technique but does nothing for the creative soul. It's what's different from the original that makes something one of a kind and human.