mixed media cat

At the moment, I have a nine year old student who is working on creating her own personal deck of cards made out of some stylized princess drawings she had done in her sketchbook. When she brought her sketchbook to the studio to show me her drawings, I suggested maybe using them in a deck of cards. She was quite excited but reality has set in that it means creating 52 cards.  52!!

That can be overwhelming and so what has begun to happen is that she works on her cards at the beginning of class until she's had enough and then we work on something completely different.

Over a period of two half class periods, she created the mixed media cat below.

The first week, she completed the base of the canvas so that it was ready to put her painting on the following week.

The second week, she painted on her cat using high flow acrylic paints.

I was so proud of her because she finally has become confident enough to allow her work to really loosen up and embrace what different paints do on different surfaces. Because of this new found confidence, I think this is probably one of her best paintings yet.

Once she finished her cat, I gave her some stencils to choose from and a couple of paper punches I had that she could place a few more layers on top of the painting.

The end result is breathtaking.

9 year old, Tuxedo Cat