a magical mix

months and months ago, ema stumbled across an unopened 3ft. x 3ft. blank canvas i had been storing behind my bed. she was immediately "itching" to do something with it. (and frankly, so was i - my initial intentions were to create something to hang on the wall behind my bed...but months had gone by without any time/energy to break out the paints).

so, upon this magical discovery, (keep in mind, ema is my little artist and a very deep thinker), she approached me with an idea. "mom, how about we create a 'family painting' to do at one of our family nights?" truthfully, at first, i wasn't too keen on the idea because i had my "own" ideas for the canvas and frankly, i wanted to paint on it all by myself. and in the back of my mind, i'm thinking this is just a ploy for ema to be able to get her hands on that large blank canvas that's been begging for paint. but the more i thought about it over the last couple of months, (and the more time the canvas continued to sit behind my bed), the more the idea grew on me.

with some "fine tuning" we decided to embark on her idea this past sunday. there are 5 of us in our family, so each of us were to pick ONE color. (clara chose pink, ema chose green, j picked black, i went with blue - even though i wanted pink...clara stole my color - *wink*), and we chose 'mango' for ella.) we sectioned off the canvas into 4 areas for those of us who would be painting and then we left the middle part alone for ella's color and for me to be able to "tie it all together". there were NO rules - except to stay in "your" section and use ONLY the 5 colors each of us picked out. (surprisingly, i did not get specific with anyone - even though i would've normally tried to "gently encourage" a certain look/color/style/pattern, etc. to go with the decor of our home.) for this project, i really wanted this to end up being a unique work of art....displaying each of our own creative talents/abilities/thoughts/emotion... AND...this was to also be symbolic of our "blended family". (ema had even previously mentioned she wanted it to represent all of us "working together"). such a deep little thinker...
and so...without further ado...here's what we came up with:

ella's section (& also the "intersection" of everyone's art)

"it takes blending a palette of vivid colors to create a work of art"

(us...being the vivid colors and our life together being the work of art)

ema's section

 

clara's section

j's section

(j's nickname is now "jason-angelo")

jessica's section

the complete work of art

i'm so happy with how it turned out...seriously. it's a "one-of-a-kind" and such a poetic symbol to hang in our home....  it exemplifies everything about our little blended family so perfectly....it's kind of quirky, it's vibrant, it's filled with bits of imperfection, it's a little off-balance, it's creative,  it's got all kinds of very different elements but at the end of the day...it's quite a magical mix.

and keeping it real:   clara and em used a yellow color before realizing it wasn't one of the colors we'd originally picked as our "5 color palette".  aaannnddd...i didn't get hardly any blue paint on the canvas before finally deciding to hold ella so everyone else could get theirs done. i had to finish mine yesterday....and clara finished hers up yesterday as well. (& you know i got slack from j who is convinced i purposely put off doing my section in order to size-up everyone else's art...and then try to out do them all). *laughing* and definitely NOT true - kind of.