Playground Love

Happy Valentine's Day! We are all sick here, so our big evening plans include eating the delicious homemade soup Papaeel made, followed by curling up in bed together with a movie. I got sick first and so while I had planned on making extravagant hand cut Valentine's with Littlemaneel, I ended up changing gears and then handing it over to Papaeel so he could work some of that digital magic that he does. Here's the finished product...

Not bad, considering our health over the last week. Luckily, we found our DSLR battery charger (yay!) and were able to use our good camera to take some photos of Littlemaneel playing his trumpet. We narrowed down the best shots, decided on one and incorporated the print that he created last weekend in the both the background and hearts. We tossed around a few ideas for the caption, but figured since most of the people receiving this year's Valentine's are 3,000 miles away, blowing our love their way worked. Here's hoping you all have whatever kind of Valentine's or Anna Howard Shaw Day you've envisioned!

Until next time,

Mamaeel

Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime

We are lucky to again live in a city with a Dick Blick. While it is now one of many art supply stores in the area, I am still a fan and stop in when I have time and am in that neighborhood. On our last visit, we made one purchase and that was a 12pk of Scratch Art Scratch Foam. We are big into printmaking and have wanted to expose Littlemaneel to it. These soft boards only require a pencil or back of a paintbrush to imprint your design, so we just handed Littlemaneel a board and pencil and let him draw to his heart's content. He started off drawing a mountain with The Cat in the Hat on top and went on to add his face and so on. Once he was finished, we got out the brayer and paint and went to printmaking town! It was a fun process and he really got into it. 

Finished prints (the black one is the foam board covered in paint).

Littlemaneel designing his foam board.

He really loved rolling the brayer in paint and then onto his board.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

Now we press his board onto a piece of colored paper we've selected.

He picked up the process quickly and was adamant on not receiving much assistance.

Pulling the board away from the paper.

First finished print!

Definitely something we will be doing again! Papaeel and I are even thinking about creating a few boards. Next time, we will make sure we are stocked up on fabric paint so Littlemaneel can print a t-shirt or two! With the freezing rain keeping us in most of today, we are thinking we'll incorporate some of the prints we made into littlemaneel's valentine's. We'll be sure to post pics of the final outcome.

*Apologies for the poor photo quality. These were all taken on the iPad as we cannot find our battery charger for our DSLR (Nooooooo!). We recently took a trip home and are hoping it's still wedged in a suitcase somewhere.

Until next time,
Mamaeel