A Study in Rainbow

For want of a better phrase, little J has been busy creating her own unit study in colour.

I must admit, I do dread when little J wants to paint (which is every day), because it means an hour or two of constant monitoring. And I do mean constant – if the phone rings and I answer it, by the time I get to ‘hello’, chances are the floor, the rug and quite possibly the lounge will be covered in paint. J also loves to zoom through painting – requiring new paper every 30 seconds or so (or so it feels, but it’s probably closer to a few minutes. Some masterpieces take a while, maybe 10 minutes – oh glory!).

First three paintings from left to right.
I have no idea how she managed such colour variation
with the same brush and no water to clean her brush in between.

And woe betide mummy if I do not whisk the old painting away fast enough. I don’t mind the complete table-painting (including the legs) so much, but the picking up of the painting and helpfully dumping it on the floor or lounge is rather make-worky.

Duplo-Lego creation with perfectly matching colours.

As the amount of paintings is fairly large, and the space to store them small, we also find ourselves dodging between wet paintings in the kitchen for the next few days while they dry. I did experiment with leaving the wet paintings in out of the way places around the house, but this generally lead to spontaneous repaintings involving TV cabinets, floors and toys.

As a result, J only gets to do painting every 3 days or so. In between she has to make-do with other forms as of colour – like creating rainbow towers of Duplo. Or the rather interesting Lego-Duplo rainbow line.

The average amount of paintings
created by J after a painting session

As we’ve been doing a bit of renovating, she has also enjoyed  helping herself to colour – swatches from the painting section of our local hardware store. As well as their little books of colour suggestions. Yes, she has studied and ‘read’ them rather intently.

She also understands colours – all of these paintings were created with a primary colour set of red, blue, yellow and white, and she rarely, if ever uses them as-is, but always mixes them into new and interesting combinations.

More paintings from this week

We also go to the NGV gallery a lot – the kids section is always changing and usually awesome. I’d like to think I do it for the culture, but it’s more that it’s free, indoors and close enough to DH’s work that he can meet us afterwards and help get our cavalcade home. But both J and C do love going and looking at all the paintings (OK, C likes the ancient weapons more).

And as much as I dread the painting days, I know it is doing her a world of good. You see, she is sensory defensive and also has SPD, just like her brother. This is compounded by her anxiety disorder. Which means, when something sensory triggers her, she gets very, very upset. Thankfully, painting (with a brush) has helped her overcome her fear of sticky liquids, like paint. She will even paint her own hands to do hand-painting now. Granted, she will then insist on having her hands immediately cleaned (or we enter melt-down territory), but it’s definite, messy progress.

…and more paintings. I also found another cache
of paintings from this week,  but gave up trying to photograph them
when the kids started jumping on these paintings

Of course, just like when C was the same age, we are being drowned in paper. With C it was writing in pen – maps, maps, maps and letters, letters, letters. With J it is colour.

And she really does love colours. I’m just not sure what’s she’s going to decide to colour next …

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