As an experiment, on Thursday I went by SCRAP and picked up two tubes of nice acrylics instead of the inexpensive paint I've been using, and then tried swooping around with that, and it was like a whole different thing. Which wasn't surprising, exactly, but I'm not good at spending money on myself so I'm taking as long as possible to decide I'm going to sink more than $20 into this.
When I was a kid my parents' house had a bunch of art up, and a lot of it was stuff my dad had painted. I was a preteen before I figured out that most of them were done working from Frazetta, but they are really nice reproductions all the same. I thought of my dad as an artist and wanted to be one like him (and then I got into comics but that's another story) but I always had the sense there'd be a point where I could do "real art" he'd be interested in but I was never there.
Eventually I met lots of much better artists online and mostly stopped drawing because I was aware of how much I was not conveying my ideas onto the paper.
But anwyay, so I was painting the other night and Bug sees my art in the morning and announces she wants to paint with me. In fact, she asked several times during the week, but our evenings are busy. I got the chance to set up for it today and we sat side by side and painted, and I showed her how I use palette knives and she also used a paper towel for texture and I gotta say I freaking love how it came out. It's going up on the wall with mine tomorrow.
Putting her art up on the walls is important to me. It was a big deal to me that P liked some of my art enough to encourage me to hang it, and it was important to me when they mentioned wanting to do a painting class to hang their art too. Because I want Bug to feel like a contributor to the family, it's been important to me to get her art up since she started coloring and gluing.
Today she brought me a different drawing and asked me to put it up in a frame, and I did. And it made me so freaking happy that she's proud of it enough to want it up on the wall and confident in my response enough to ask. And now it's on the wall in the living room, near some of my paintings, and her painting will join it tomorrow.
Even when the world is a trashfire, she keeps me going.