Ep 10 - 5 Ways to Involve Your Kids in Your Art Practice
There are huge benefits to merging your art making, motherhood and business together - they don’t always have to be totally separate parts of life. In this episode I’m sharing my experiences on how I’ve blended motherhood with artistry and business and hope this episode leaves you feeling inspired and empowered to involve your kids in creativity as you move through life together!
In This Episode Keita Discusses:
· Ideas on how you can roll in life as a mom with your artistic and creative making process (they don’t have to be mutually exclusive parts of your life)
· The positive impact that making art around your kids can have on your family.
· How to build your art skills together with your child.
· Insights on how involving your kids in the business side of your art making can be a great teacher.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Click Here to Download your FREE WORKBOOK to help you with the next steps for setting up your ideal art making space.
DM me on Instagram @artbykeita - I'd love to hear if you have any tips about how you involve your kids in your art or creative process!
00:05
Hello, and welcome to the painty mama podcast. We're taught that artists are poor, throw kids in the mix and it seems impossible to thrive. While balancing motherhood creative projects, and building a business along with everything else is hard. I believe the universe gave you your unique talents and children so you could live a full inspiring, creative, beautiful life together. Join me for conversations about creativity, motherhood, business, and finding calm in the chaos. I'm Keita Thomas, and this is the painty mama podcast.
00:39
Hello, lovely, I hope you're well, thank you for joining me on today's episode of the painty mama podcast. Today, we're talking about five ways that you can involve your kids in your art practice.
00:55
I find that often we can compartmentalize our lives. And we can think there's a time for sleep, there's a time for work, and I have to chop everything up into these very manageable chunks so that I can kind of delegate and section out my life so it makes sense. So it makes logical sense to us. But if motherhood has taught me anything, (and I continue to learn this over and over again), the most fulfilling way that I've found to live life is not by chopping things up and sectioning them out, it's actually by rolling and folding in aspects of life all together. So whether that's by like, cleaning up after dinner, and doing that all together, instead of just asking them to go upstairs and get the pajamas on while I do all the housework or, you know, putting the laundry away together or tidying up their toys, and reorganizing things together, or making dinner and asking them to help prep the meal, maybe like chop up some of the vegetables or tear up some of the salad. I think that by preparing a meal together or doing things that are generally just life living together, everybody's happy. And everybody's learning how to take care of themselves and others when we work as a team. Because I think essentially, that's what a family is, we're a team of people who are supporting and loving each other through life. So doing everything and taking everything on yourself can feel like, "oh, I'll get through it quicker or be more efficient if I just do it". But you're kind of depriving children of the opportunity to learn all of those really valuable life skills as you roll through life together. So I don't want to carry on going on down that tangent for too long. So I just want to get stuck into five ways to involve your kids in your art practice. So the first thing I'd like to bring up is be in the same room. And it ties into what we were talking about already with folding everything in. If you're physically in the same room your kids are, they're bearing witness to what you're doing. They're watching you, they're watching you create and it's inspiring their creativity, by you actually taking the time to lean into yours while you're in their presence instead of shutting yourself in a separate room or something or waiting until they're out of the house so that you can finally get something done. Although sometimes we need that time to be like focused and productive, your children are experiencing the joy that you get from your creative practice, the expression that you have, you know, when you're in the flow, you want to let them see you when you're in the flow rather than just, if they're never in the room with you, they'll never see the joy that you get from creating art or whatever kind of creative practice you have, whether that's you know, sewing or singing, or if you don't do it around them - eventually, they won't value it as much because it hasn't been part of their everyday experience. And part of seeing their mum lifted up through the practice of doing those things.
04:17
So what I like to do is, every time I sit down and I'm going to start painting something as part of my like, setup process for getting my paints and stuff, I'll make sure that I have a similar project for them to do and it will always be the same, but something that's similar. So if I'm drawing something, I'll get out their pencils and they can sketch next to me because undoubtedly, if they see me doing that, then they're gonna ask me that anyway. I don't know if you found that with your children, but whatever I'm doing, they want to be involved in and your kids just want to mirror you. They want to learn from you. Be around you be like you you're that ultimate model for how we live life. And if you think back to when you were a kid, I don't know about you, but I was definitely always following my mom around and trying to, you know, copy the things that she did. And even down to language and stuff, you know, we learn language, we learn how to communicate through our parents. So it makes sense that if you're watching your parent be creative that you would want to engage in something similar to that as well.
05:26
My second point is let them be artists too. So, as artists, we often have a vision in our mind, before we start sitting down to paint something or creating whatever it is that you're creating, we have a particular way of doing that, and a vision in our minds. However, there are certain ways and I've done this before, I haven't done it for a while, but I've been thinking about lately. And that's what inspired this episode. Because I did used to do this when my oldest was about three, she's seven now. But when she was about three, I used to get her to, you know, join in with me painting. So I would get the canvases out. And I knew that I kind of needed a similar grounding color in the background. And a lot of my pieces are abstract in the background, and more realism in the foreground. So it worked really well, I would get out only the colors that I kind of knew I wanted those canvases to be grounded in or have like elements of those colors that I would then layer up on afterwards. But she would paint and get all those basic colors on all the basic abstract, you know, shapes, and then I would work with that afterwards. And it was really beautiful to be experiencing that creative process together. And I want to bring that back. Because I haven't done that for probably, I don't know, a couple of years or so. And it's really nice to feel like you made a piece together. And it makes you approach your work in like a less controlled way. I'm a very kind of controlled meticulous painter, and something that I've explored through watercolors. And just in life being a mum is always lessons that I'm coming up against about releasing control, and having that be the perfect experience - an uncontrolled experience. So there's some really interesting things that can happen when your children are not putting the paint exactly where you would put it or where you're envisioning in your mind. But then when you can actually then take that and then build upon it, it creates a lot more interest. And you'll try different things that you didn't ever previously think that you would even want to try or your brain wouldn't go there. So you're working with that and collaborating together.
07:13
Something else that I have done probably more recently, is using the watercolor texture papers as a background for the ink pieces that I've done. So I will lay out a bunch of watercolor paper and let them play with my watercolors, you know, the posh ones, not the kid ones, but I'll let them play with those. Again, I kind of control the palette, I'm not gonna lie, I don't just let like full rein, because I know I'm going to end up with like a muddy mess. But if I give them like one or two colors that are complimentary, I will encourage them to play with that, make a few different textures on a few different bits of paper. And not all of them work out. But some of them I've taken those then and then I've done ink drawings over the top. And they really steer the piece in a different way than I would usually think about it if I was planning it meticulously. So it's actually really fun, I would encourage you to do that.
08:57
And that brings me on to my third point, which is make space both mentally and physically for mess to happen. I think that perfectionism it really doesn't serve anyone. It's something that I think we often like bring up if you're in a job interview or something, isn't it like "what's your weakness?" - "Oh, I'm such a perfectionist", which is like definitely something that I have said in those scenarios before. Because we see it as this like, "Oh, I just care so much". So it's like a positive negative. (I don't even know if that's the thing but) a positive negative comment. And I think it is important actually just to see perfection and perfectionism for what it is. Which is a desire to make things perfect and sometimes that can really hold you back from moving forward with things and you can get stuck in that and it doesn't feel good. It doesn't serve anybody. So allowing yourself space and allowing me children's space to make mess and just make it imperfect on purpose really, it will push your own boundaries. I kind of want you to think about as well, when was the last time that you released control when it comes to your art practice? When was the last time you let yourself make a mess? And also not just in your art practice, but just in life. When was the last time that you were okay with you making a mess? And I have this thing in our house, right? "It's okay to make a mess. As long as we clean it up afterwards". It's like a chant that we have. But I do stick by that, because it's important to take care of ourselves and our homes and each other, and make sure that we have a nice environment. But it's also important, equally as important, to allow ourselves to make a mess, to make mistakes, to learn from all different kinds of things. And it really allows you to embrace their exploration, and witness their exploration. And what I found is when I let my kids do that, is it always surprises me each time as well, is that the outcome end up for me personally, being that they - with letting them explore their boundaries and make a mess, I kind of have this like, "Oh, well, I may as well join in anyway", attitude. And then I ended up surprising myself, and they encourage me to make more, more mess. More, you know what we would, or what I would previously deem as like a "mistake" or like not the best color choice, I will just do it anyway. And sometimes those I'm gonna sound like Bob Ross now like those happy little accidents do happen in those spaces where you just let yourself go a little bit. And art is supposed to be fun! When you're a kid and you're painting and you're drawing. It's just, you do it because it's fun, you don't do it because you're trying to make a masterpiece and create beauty in the world. I think that comes more once you reach adulthood. And then you know, from a therapy point of view, it's like the emotional process. But from a kid's point of view, it's just for fun. And it really helps to bring in that sense of fun and play back into your art practice. And what can be better than having fun with your kids while you're making art. I mean, that is literally my dream. And I try to do it as often as I can.
12:32
The fourth thing I want to talk about is teaching them what you want to learn more about. So, often when we think about teaching our children or teaching anyone it's like comes from a place of "I've already mastered this skill. So then I'm going to show you how to do it". But rather than teaching from a place of knowledge teach from a place of exploration as well. So if you're thinking about how you'd like to, I don't know, expand your knowledge on color theory, for example, you could make a color wheel together, you could do yours, they could do theirs, you can sit together to do it. And you can talk about what you discovered about how the colors mix. And what happens if there's more water added to the watercolor and how the paint moves around. And this really can help your learning too. So anything that you're trying to work on, you can do it alongside and you can learn and have a conversation together about it. So you're both learning together, rather than there being this kind of hierarchical (is that how you say hierarchical? hierarchy?) Rather than there being this hierarchical, "I'm the teacher and you must sit and learn" because as that, you're not actually learning and expanding yourself. But what if you sit down and you're learning it together. Or just to use another couple of examples, like if you want to study anatomy, or still life drawing, or just getting better at your sketching, you could set a timer and sketch the same thing together for five minutes. And make it into a game. Make it fun for both of you. Maybe you could, you know, sketch for five minutes, the mug or something together, sketch that for five minutes, and then set the timer and do the mug three times and then you can compare, you know, not to each other. Because I think that can be a bit of a dent in confidence. But also that teaches as well - teaches your child to not compare to others, but to compare to the previous versions of themselves and watch them grow. And you're also doing that again, you're teaching that to yourself at the same time. And I think that learning alongside your kids, it shows them that it's okay when you don't know everything and the adults actually don't know and everything and that we're also human just like them, and that we're always learning. When I was a kid, I thought adults knew everything and I felt once I got to be an adult, that would be it. I would know everything in the whole world. Everything there was to know, life would make sense everything would make sense. And honestly, I feel like it makes less sense - haha, I don't know how you feel! But I wish I'd have known that as a child so I could have appreciated the human-ness in my parents and my teachers and accept more then that other people are making mistakes as they go. Rather than watching people try to cover up their mistakes, or justify mistakes as something that they meant to happen. You know, that can be confusing. So watching somebody be willing to learn and willing to make mistakes, make a mess is just so valuable, I think from a child's perspective.
15:43
So point number five is more for the business owning art moms, and something that has been - you know, what this actually really started me on this whole journey, and has been a really key point in me developing on these views that I'm talking about on the whole content of the podcast, and everything is kind of where I saw this grow from and that is, packaging orders together.
16:12
I think I mentioned in a previous episode that I had a lovely moment with my daughter. And I didn't even realize that she was watching me do that. But she's gained so much from doing that together. And it was once I started rolling my children in with what I was doing in that aspect of life that it started to feel like less of a battle for me to be a mum, in one section of my life and an artist in another section of my life and a business owner in another section of my life. So it's like blending those things together has made me and my entire family so much more happy and together, and it just brings joy and learning into every experience that we have. So yeah, packaging orders together. And they come up with so many good questions. And it's really helped me to reflect and reinforce because I'm having to explain and put into words like why I'm using that kind of envelope. Why I'm, you know, writing someone's name in a certain way, why I want it to be nice when they open it and how it's important to make people feel special when they open something. And I think it teaches them other skills as well, like we've got the creative art side, but from packaging orders together, they learn about websites, and business and money and e-commerce and how the postal service works when they take a trip to the post office with me. So involving them in the process has been so unexpectedly beneficial. And it's really helped me to not separate those areas of my life so much. Sometimes I kind of have to do as sometimes, you know, want to not have them touch the oil painting while it's still fresh, so there's not fingerprints. But you know, there are ways to roll them into your creative practice. And I hope that from this episode, you've gained a few ideas. These are the ways that I've done it. And I will continue to learn because I just love rolling with this. And if I have any more ideas that come up, maybe we'll do a subsequent episode about it. And I hope that it's got your wheels turning in ways that you can roll in aspects (I'm not saying the whole thing), but aspects of your creative artistic process with your motherhood so that you can kind of gel them together and have fun with it!
So thanks so much for joining me today. I know that you're busy, probably mommying, making, doing all the things. So I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen to my voice today and have this chat. If you'd like some help with designing your ideal art making space that fits with your life and your creative style and everything you ever dreamed of, I have a mini workbook that I created. That's a free resource for you. And if you go to www.KeitaThomas.com/shownotes/5 we talk about going through that process in Episode Five but I would really encourage you to go and grab that and dig into it because it really does help to have a place to go that's inspiring and beautiful. And makes you want to make! Feel free to DM me on Instagram @artbykeita. I'd love to hear from you and If you have any other tips about how you involve your kids in your art or creative process, I'd absolutely love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to subscribe and tell your friends about it because I'd really love for more Painty Mama's to feel empowered and to feel like they can do motherhood and pursue their creative passions at the same time, it's super important. So if you found this useful, please let them know or leave a review because that also helps other moms to find us as well. Thanks again for being here. And until next time, have a beautiful creative painty mother of a week!