Leif earns his bristles

Summers are for fighting with the overgrown garden, and for picking fruits, and for children leaping up into your face like trout while you are trying to read a book or mix solvents or use a circular saw. You can lay out bowls of cereal in front of cartoons, you can bait the couch with piles of Adventure Time comics, but they will find you. Even people who don't have kids can hear the nazgul shrieks and rumble of scooter wheels in the streets, see the tiny fingers under the cracks of their front doors when they mix a pitcher of kool-aid. Get your hoses, folks, they are coming.

Mondays are normally painting days, but summer break has set a pack of children loose in my house. Yesterday I was hiding in the corner of the dining room behind my portable easel when Leif popped up at my elbow. "MOM." "WHAT." "Can you teach me to paint?"

I can barely teach full-grown adults to use the catalog computer at the library. My special skills are of the quacking, woofing, piling-books-into-the-arms-of-young-parents variety. Most of the time, when someone asks you to teach them something, they mean "show me the answer". Faced with a patron's limp-armed refusal to click a button on a mouse, I usually pivot on my heel and pass them off to a co-worker. There are paper bag puppets to assemble.

But why not? He's 9 years old, he won't eat the paint. "Okay, we can do this, but you need to understand that I am a terrible teacher and you will need to watch youtube tutorials with me." A bargain was struck.

The method I learned from is the student method taught by Mark Carder in his Draw Mix Paint videos.

We watched a couple demos, then ransacked the kitchen for an attractive piece of fruit and ran down to the studio. Zenny set up a still life with a plastic apple and some puddles of non-toxic acrylics, and Leif settled himself at the big easel for his first oil painting. We had a talk about how not to poison yourself and die, mixed his color strings together, and then I sat at his shoulder doing the intonations: check your color, make the mark. Look at the shape of the shadows. Squint. Step back. Check your color, make the mark. Slow down. Small strokes. Follow the curve of the surface. More paint. Check the color. Make the mark. Check it. Mark it. 

And damned if that kid didn't stay focused for a full three hours, until the last stroke went down - bloop, a dab of highlight - and he threw his hands up. Zenny had finished her apple ages ago and was laying on the studio rug with a bucket of Lego when we stood back and had a final look at the thing. We were all kind of surprised. It was really good.

When Leif gets excited or confused, he starts laughing maniacally. He has a laugh like a cartoon villain. He did that now, looking at his first painting and feeling big things about it. "I thought I would be bored by the videos, but they were really inspiring! I thought I would paint a big mess, but it looks like an actual pear!"

This kid.

I will buy the child all the paint he needs. Forever. Any canvas or board or paper he desires. Painting Mondays are back on, and for the rest of the summer they belong to Leif.