I (Peta) LOVE painting and art and before I had kids, painting days were a big destressor for me and something I did often.
Honestly, since becoming a Mum, it’s definitely one of the things that I’ve neglected and put on the back burner – just because finding that solid few hours to take out and paint has seemed like something difficult to schedule.
BUT, since Luca has turned 2, his attention span for activities has really started to come on, and one of the things that he’s loving is painting. I don’t think we’re quite at the point where I feel I can get out the huge acrylic canvases again, but doing some painting together and using my small sketchbook has become a really fun activity.
And I’ve started to combine it with another of our favourite activities – story time! We read tons of books in our house, but I also make up some fun, stupid, random stories for bedtime. They normal involve animal sounds (which Luca finds hilarious) and thus, a variety of animal characters. So recently I started to sketch out some of my story characters for Luca, and he has been LOVING it.
I would really like to make him and Ko their own children’s book, with one of our favourite bedtime stories – but maybe that’s a pretty long term goal. Haha!
Has anyone ever combined their passions like this? I would love to hear from other storyteller artists about how you share these things with your kids!
In the meantime, our favourite story right now is called ‘Have you ever seen a bear?’ (it’s my own creation, inspired by our Hokkaido bears), and so above are some of my character sketches. And yes, this story involves a friendly bear and a tiny mouse – not very realistic, but plenty of fun animal sounds!
